Commonwealth v. Parker’s Empirical Analysis
1928
Citation profile
20 federal appellate · 93 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 117 later decisions — most recently October 1972 · most notably Commonwealth v. Wable (1955), Commonwealth v. Williams (1931)
20 federal appellate · 93 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 Wilson v. United States · People v. Witt · Gail v. Philadelphia · People v. Welch · Commonwealth v. Weiss
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 117 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The Chief Justice stated that since the statute required the jurors to assess the punishment and permitted them to extend mercy in a proper case by reducing the penalty to life imprisonment, the jury should be permitted to have the same sort of information that a judge considers when he decides as to the punishment for crime. But since in Pennsylvania the jurors may not render piecemeal verdicts there is no provision for separate inquiry. Hence, concluded the Chief Justice, their single verdict must include both their finding as to the defendant's guilt and their determination as to the penalty to be imposed upon him.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage
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.