Commonwealth v. Harrington’s Empirical Analysis
1975
Citation profile
2 district · 18 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 20 later decisions — most recently December 2009
2 district · 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 Witherspoon v. Illinois · Furman v. Georgia · Taylor v. Louisiana · Bouie v. City of Columbia · United States v. Jackson
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 20 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Apart from what seem like clear instructions to us from the United States Supreme Court, a retroactive legislative change from discretionary to mandatory death sentence would be an unconstitutional ex post facto law. United States Constitution, art. 1, § 10. Declaration of Rights of the Massachusetts Constitution, art. 24. [Citations omitted]. An unfore seeable judicial decision having the same effect is equally barred by the due process clause. Bouie v. Columbia, 378 U.S. 347, 353-54 , 84 S.Ct. 1697 , 12 L.Ed.2d 894 (1964).” 323 N.E.2d at 900 .”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. State v. Lindquist
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.