McGhee v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1980
Citation profile
28 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 30 later decisions — most recently July 2008 · most notably 11 Va. App. 535 - Rollston v. Commonwealth (1991), Sutton v. Commonwealth (1985)
28 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 Nye & Nissen v. United States · United States v. Peoni · State v. Hunter
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 30 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“This definition mandates that in the trial of an accessory before the fact the Commonwealth establish the following elements beyond a reasonable doubt: the commission of the crime by the principal, the accessory’s absence at the commission of the offense, and that before the commission of the crime, the accessory was “in some way concerned therein ... as [a] contriver, instigator or advisor.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
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.