McClain v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1949
Citation profile
43 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 45 later decisions — most recently December 2015 · most notably City of Raton v. Sproule (1967), Keesee v. Commonwealth (1975)
43 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Relies on Williams v. People of State of New York · The People v. Popescue · Murphy v. State · Commonwealth v. Brown · Hobson v. Youell
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 45 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Tribunals passing on the guilt of a defendant always have been hedged in by strict evidentiary procedural limitations. But both before and since the American colonies became a nation, courts in this country and in England practiced a policy under which a sentencing judge could exercise a wide discretion in the sources and types of evidence used to assist him in determining the kind and extent of punishment to be imposed within limits fixed by law.”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“be adjudged guilty only on evidence admissible on that issue.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“the task of the judge, within fixed statutory or constitutional limits, is to determine the type and extent of punishment after the issue of guilt has been determined, to the end that punishment should fit the offender and not merely the crime.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.