Commonwealth v. Williams’s Empirical Analysis
1931
Citation profile
5 federal appellate · 2 district · 180 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 191 later decisions — most recently March 2016 · most notably Commonwealth v. Story (1978), Commonwealth v. Lark (1988)
5 federal appellate · 2 district · 180 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 Commonwealth v. Quaranta · People v. Witt · Commonwealth v. Parker · Commonwealth v. Buccieri · Shaffner 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 191 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“There are, however, many well recognized exceptions where the commission of another offense by the defendant may be received in evidence. Prior convictions can be admitted in evidence to show intent, scienter, motive, identity, plan, or the accused to be one of an organization banded together to commit crimes of the sort charged, or that such prior conviction or criminal act formed a part of a chain, or was one of a sequence of acts, or became part of the history of the event on trial, or was part of the natural development of the facts; [*] also to prove the mental condition when the defense was insanity, or to rebut the inference of mistake, or to show a guilty knowledge: Com. v. Coles, supra; Com. v. Cicere, 282 Pa. 492 ; Com. v. Dorst, 285 Pa. 232 ; Com. v. Quaranta, 295 Pa. 264 .”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Commonwealth v. Ross
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.