Brown v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1971
Citation profile
24 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 26 later decisions — most recently March 2018 · most notably Smith v. Commonwealth (1978), Stamper v. Commonwealth (1979)
24 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 Witherspoon v. Illinois · Swain v. State of Alabama · Martin v. Commonwealth · Timmons v. Commonwealth · Fogg v. Commonwealth
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 26 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[a] detailed review of the evidence of the circumstances surrounding this murder and the evidence pointing to the defendant's guilt as the murderer leaves no doubt in our mind that this evidence, viewed in the light most favorable to the Commonwealth, amply supports the jury's verdict.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. In Re: Brown
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.