Commonwealth v. Rhoades’s Empirical Analysis
1980
Citation profile
2 district · 90 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 92 later decisions — most recently January 2020 · most notably State v. Martin (1990), Commonwealth v. Toney (1982)
2 district · 90 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 In the Matter of Samuel Winship · Commonwealth v. Latimore · California v. Civil Aeronautics Board · Goldstein v. United States · National Ass'n for the Advancement of Colored People v. Federal Power Commission
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 92 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[W]here the defendant chooses to engage in a gun battle with another with the intent to kill or do grievous bodily harm and a third party is killed, the defendant can be held liable for the homicide even if it was the defendant’s opponent who fired the fatal shot. Thus, the inability to prove who fired the fatal shot would not be ground for a directed verdict.... The defendant’s act must be “a cause, which, in the natural and continuous sequence, produces the death, and without which the death would not have occurred.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“must determine whether the Commonwealth's evidence, `considered in its light most favorable to the Commonwealth, was sufficient to permit the jury to infer the existence of [criminal responsibility].'”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“[q]uestions not aimed at `revealing racial bias or any similarly indurated and pervasive prejudice' are not constitutionally required”
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.