38 Md. App. 700 - Spears v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1978
Citation profile
2 district · 10 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 12 later decisions — most recently October 2013
2 district · 10 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 State v. Hutchinson · Davis v. State · Brice v. State · 5 Md. App. 354 - Melia v. State · 2 Md. App. 45 - Carwell v. State
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 12 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““We think that the special element of mens-rea in malicious mischief, designated in the statute as ‘wilfully and maliciously,’ requires either a specific intent to cause the destruction, injury, defacement or molestation of property of another, or an act done in wanton and wilful disregard of the plain and strong likelihood of such harm, without any justification, excuse, or substantial mitigation.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority““It shall be unlawful for any person knowingly to retain in his possession or to offer for sale any manufactured article or product from which the manufacturer’s serial number has been removed, defaced or obliterated.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Davis v. Fowler
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.