Williams v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

6 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 6 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““A fact may be proved by circumstances no less than by words, and this rule is applied to the question of penetration just as it is in other questions of fact arising in criminal cases. Here the parties went to the woods for this purpose; the witness testified they stayed on the ground all night, and defendant got on top of her and had sexual intercourse with her two or three times that night. Certainly a jury giving this evidence reasonable effect did not need to be told that there was penetration of the female parts. This was the purpose of the whole adventure, and it must be presumed that the witness used the words ‘sexual intercourse’ in their ordinary sense.””

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