Fitzgerald v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1982
Citation profile
6 federal appellate · 138 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 148 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently November 2019 · most notably City of Xenia v. Wallace (1988), LeVasseur v. Commonwealth (1983)
6 federal appellate · 138 state decisions — followed in 10 states
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 Chapman v. State of California · Blockburger v. United States · North Carolina v. Pearce · Furman v. Georgia · Brown v. Ohio
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 148 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[t]he overriding purpose of the murder statutes being gradation, we can divine no legislative intent to eliminate punishment for other offenses included in the murder statutes solely for the purpose of categorizing the murder.... In the face of the current statutory scheme and its legislative history, we can not say that the legislature intended any elimination of underlying sentencing authority for rape and robbery when it modified the murder statutes in 1975, or on any prior occasion.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[t]he General Assembly grades murder in order to assign punishment consistent with prevailing societal and legal views of what is appropriate and procedurally fair.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“When, as here, conviction of a greater crime, murder, cannot be had without conviction of the lesser crime, robbery with firearms, the Double Jeopardy Clause bars prosecution for the lesser crime, after conviction of the greater one.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. State v. Muhammad
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.