Commonwealth v. Capalla’s Empirical Analysis
1936
Citation profile
6 federal appellate · 88 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 94 later decisions — most recently March 2019 · most notably State v. Couture (1984), Commonwealth v. Simon (1968)
6 federal appellate · 88 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. Nicely · Commonwealth v. Bubnis · Commonwealth v. Ronello · Tiffany v. Commonwealth · Abernethy 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 94 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““There are no facts in the record warranting any such belief [that Capaila was a cold-blooded killer] on the part of anyone, and even if there were, the first officials who had the right to give expression to that belief were the jurors after the case was committed to their keeping. The application of epithets to a defendant on trial, and expressions of personal belief in a defendant’s guilt have no legitimate place in a district attorney’s argument. A closing argument can be strong and convincing without them.” [Emphasis supplied.] 6”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“It is no part of a district attorney’s duty, and it is not his right, to stigmatize a defendant. He has a right to argue that the evidence proves the defendant guilty as charged in the indictment, but for the district attorney himself to characterize the defendant as ‘a cold-blooded killer’ is something quite different. No man on trial for murder can be officially characterized as a murderer or as ‘a cold-blooded killer,’ until he is adjudged guilty of murder or pleads guilty to that charge. (Emphasis in original.)”
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.