Montgomery v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1981
Citation profile
4 district · 106 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 110 later decisions — most recently August 2022 · most notably MacK v. State (1984), Merzbacher v. State (1997)
4 district · 106 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 Duncan v. State of Louisiana · Sparf v. United States · Stevenson 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 110 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“However, with respect to Part I of the Court’s opinion, I continue to adhere to the views expressed in my dissenting opinion in Stevenson v. State, 289 Md. 167, 189-204 , 423 A.2d 558, 570-577 (1980). Specifically, I believe that Article 23 of the Maryland Declaration of Rights, and those portions of Maryland Rule 757 b and g implementing Article 23, violate the Fourteenth and Sixth Amendments to the United States Constitution. See 289 Md. at 191-194 , 423 A.2d 558 . Article 23, by authorizing a criminal jury in certain limited circumstances to disregard legally correct instructions, and find the law to be otherwise than it is, abridges a defendant’s right to be tried in accordance with the law of the jurisdiction and thus violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Moreover, Article 23 is inconsistent with the proper role of a criminal jury under the jury trial clause of the Sixth Amendment, applicable to state proceedings by virtue of the Fourteenth Amendment. See Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 145 , 88 S.Ct. 1444 , 20 L.Ed.2d 491 (1968), and Sparf v. United, States, 156 U.S. 51 , 15 S.Ct. 273 , 39 L.Ed. 343 (1895). Consequently, in my opinion, under no circum stances should a jury in a criminal case be told that it is the judge of the law.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
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.