Fletcher v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1931
Citation profile
34 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 34 later decisions — most recently August 1999 · most notably Shell v. Commonwealth (1932), Davenport v. Commonwealth (1941)
34 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 Frasure v. Commonwealth · Heck v. Commonwealth · Crenshaw v. Commonwealth · Bowman v. Commonwealth · Miller 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 34 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The court has many times held that when there is no eyewitness to a homicide and the evidence is purely circumstantial, especially where the surrounding conditions indicate that there was a struggle at the time of its commission, it is the duty of the trial court, out of due regard for human life and liberty, to instruct upon every phase or degree of the offense that might possibly be applicable in order that the jury may return a verdict under any state of fact it might infer from the circumstances to have existed. This includes an instruction on self-defense and manslaughter. Roberson’s Criminal Law, sec. 1872; Brown v. Commonwealth, 117 Ky. 767 , 78 S. W. 1126 , 25 Ky. Law Rep. 1896 ; Rutherford v. Commonwealth, 13 Bush, 608 .””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Bond v. Commonwealth
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.