Hatcher v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1978
Citation profile
4 federal appellate · 53 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 63 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently April 2015 · most notably Jackson v. Virginia (1979), LeVasseur v. Commonwealth (1983)
4 federal appellate · 53 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 Gibson v. Commonwealth · Banner v. Commonwealth · Johnson v. Commonwealth · Little v. Commonwealth · Drinkard 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 63 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“When a man has become so greatly intoxicated as not to be able to deliberate and premeditate, he cannot commit murder of the first degree, or that class of murder under our statute denominated a wilful, deliberate and premeditated killing. But so long as he retains the faculty of willing, deliberating and premeditating, though drunk, he is capable of committing murder in the first degree; and if a drunk man is guilty of a wilful, deliberate and premeditated killing, he is guilty of murder in the first degree.”
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.