3 Mass. App. Ct. 226 - Commonwealth v. Johnson’s Empirical Analysis
1975
Citation profile
15 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 15 later decisions — most recently August 1991
15 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 Miranda v. State of Arizona Vignera · United States v. Radio Television News Directors Ass'n · Louisville & Nashville Railroad v. United States · Earley v. DiCenso · Simuel v. United States
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 15 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The circumstances of mitigation or palliation were an integral part of the defendant's admission. There was ... no basis (such as inconsistency or implausibility) upon which the jury might justifiably have accepted the portion of the [defendant's] transcribed statement which admitted the stabbing but rejected the portion which described the factual context in which it occurred. The Commonwealth was not bound by the evidence of palliating circumstances it introduced; but as it introduced nothing to contradict that evidence, and nothing other than that evidence to show that the defendant intentionally killed ... [the victim], it has not proven the existence of malice, but has only proven the absence of malice.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“[t]he characteristic distinction between murder and manslaughter is malice ... [and that w]here testimony is adduced which shows ... circumstances [of palliation or mitigation], the jury may believe the testimony, and return a verdict of manslaughter, or disbelieve the testimony, and return a verdict of murder based on the inference of malice drawn from the intentional homicide.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“where the only evidence which proves the intentional homicide itself shows it to have been without malice.”
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.