328 Pa. Super. 469 - Commonwealth v. Rawls’s Empirical Analysis
1984
Citation profile
18 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 18 later decisions — most recently January 2020
18 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 Sandstrom v. Montana · Commonwealth Ex Rel. Washington v. Maroney · Commonwealth v. Williams · Commonwealth v. Shaffer · Commonwealth v. Yuknavich
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 18 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[E]ach crime enumerated in the felony-murder statute is a crime of specific intent____ Once such intent is shown, the felony-murder doctrine merely imputes the malice incident to the intentional felony over to the killing”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“I shall now define for you murder in the second degree which is known as felony murder. A criminal homicide constitutes murder of the second degree when it is committed while the defendant was engaged as a principal or a co-conspirator in the perpetration of a felony. Perpetration of a felony is defined as the act of the defendant in engaging in or being an accomplice or a co-conspirator in the' commission of or attempt to commit any one of six enumerated felonies of which robbery is one. Murder in the second degree, therefore, is known as felony murder and the malice necessary to make even an unintentional or accidental'killing murder is constructively inferred from the malice incident to- the perpetration of the initial felony. The malice of the initial felony attaches to whatever else the accused may do in connection therewith. • Under the felony murder rule, the killing need not even be done by the defendant in a particular case, but it may have been done by an accomplice or co-conspirator acting in furtherance of the felonious undertaking. In order to find the defendant guilty of. murder in the second degree, you must find that the Commonwealth has established beyond a reasonable doubt, number one, that the defendant or an accomplice or co-conspirator caused the death of another person; and, two, that the killing occurred while the defendant, an accomplice or co-conspirator was engaged in the commission of a felony. And this underlying felony here is alleged to be robber”
2 later decisions 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.