McIntire v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

5 state decisions

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 5 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““This is a correct statement of the law as administered in this jurisdiction where applied to facts such as existed here where there is evidence tending to prove that the person defended was the aggressor in the fighting and brought on the difficulty and thus would have no right to take the life of his adversary upon a claim of self-defense. Utterback v. Commonwealth, 105 Ky. 723 ; McIntosh v. Commonwealth, 29 R. 1100 ; Watkins v. Commonwealth, 123 Ky. 817 . Otherwise one might be justified in intervening, where two are participating in a fight and to take the life of one who was not at fault, and when his adversary could not rely upon a claim of self-defense if he should have- killed him himself. The instruction here complained of did not limit the right of accused to kill the deceased in the defense of his father to the right which the father had at the time to have killed the deceased in his own necessary defense, but it permitted the acquittal of accused, if he, who was not present up to the time he shot deceased and knew nothing of the cause of the trouble, nor the acts of the participants preceding his advent into it, believed from the circumstances and acts he then saw that his father was in imminent danger at the hands of deceased. Such definition of the rights of the accused being more favorable to him than to which he was entitled, he cannot complain. ’ ’”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Noble v. Commonwealth