Burden v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1944
Citation profile
16 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 16 later decisions — most recently March 2012
16 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 Fugate v. Commonwealth · Brooks v. Commonwealth · McElwain v. Commonwealth · Hendrickson v. Commonwealth · Collins 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 16 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“While a threat to kill or injure someone which is couched in vague terms and directed at no one person in particular is admissible in a homicide prosecution to show a hostility towards mankind in general and hence towards the deceased, a threat to kill or injure someone which is specifically directed at some individual other than the deceased is inadmissible, as it shows only a special malice resulting from a transaction with which the deceased had no connection.”
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.