Ford v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1992
Citation profile
55 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 55 later decisions — most recently October 2023 · most notably State v. Kelly (2011), State v. Jackson (2010)
55 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 Jackson v. Virginia · Edge v. State · Patterson v. State · Head v. State · Baker v. State
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 55 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[a] person ... commits the offense of murder when, in the commission of a felony, he causes the death of another human being irrespective of malice.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. Davis v. State · State v. Jackson“Yet, Heacock maintains that he is not criminally responsible for Wilson’s death because, he says, that was not a foreseeable consequence of the criminal conduct charged in the indictment. “[Application of the [felony-murder] rule to felonies not foreseeably dangerous,” he reasons, “would be unsound analytically, because there is no logical basis for imputing malice from the intent to commit a felony not dangerous to human life.” But nothing in [Code] § 18.2-33 limits its scope to such felonies; rather, that statute encom passes all felonious acts except capital murder and the several crimes particularly named in [Code] § 18.2-32.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“dangerousness is a prerequisite to the inclusion of a felony as an underlying felony under the felony murder statute of this state”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Jackson
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.