Commonwealth v. Samuel Jones’s Empirical Analysis
1946
Citation profile
11 federal appellate · 133 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 150 later decisions — most recently April 2017 · most notably Commonwealth v. O'SEARO (1976), Commonwealth v. Rose (1974)
11 federal appellate · 133 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. Drum · Commonwealth v. Kluska · Commonwealth v. Iacobino · Commonwealth v. Buccieri · Commonwealth. v. Garramone
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 150 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“‘The fatal use of a deadly weapon against a vital part of another’s body when established as a fact warrants an inference that the act was done with a specific intent to take life and so justifies a verdict of guilty of murder of the first degree.’ ... Nor do deadly weapons consist exclusively of peculiarly lethal instruments or devices. Indeed, ‘An intentional killing may be and often is carried out with weapons not ordinarily termed ‘deadly.’ Such weapons as revolvers are called ‘deadly’ because their normal use is to cause death. But an ax, a baseball bat, an iron bar ... may all be so used as to cause death’: ... The manner of use of such, or similar, weapons is no less capable, legally, of affording an inference of the hostile wielder’s intent to kill.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“Apart from the felonious killings which are made murder in the first degree by statute because perpetrated by means of poison or by lying in wait or committed in the perpetration of or the attempt to perpetrate one of the statutorily enumerated felonies (Act of June 24, 1939, P.L. 872, Sec. 701, 18 P.S. § 4701), "the main distinction of murder in the first from that of the second degree”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“The mere intoxication of the defendant will not excuse or palliate his offense unless he was in such a state of intoxication as to be incapable of conceiving any intent. If he was, his grade of offense is reduced to murder in the second degree.”
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.