38 Md. App. 716 - Godwin v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1978
Citation profile
23 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 27 later decisions — most recently July 2008 · most notably State v. Frye (1978), Boyce v. Allstate Insurance (1996)
23 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 Chapman v. State of California · United States v. Wade · Neil v. Biggers · Manson v. Brathwaite · Gilbert v. California
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 27 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““A similar erosion took place with respect to the word ‘aforethought.’ In its pristine state, it connoted that the intention to kill had existed some appreciable time before the actual execution of the deed. It connoted the same thing by way of preplanning that premeditation connoted early in the 19th century (when it entered the law as an attempt to rejuvenate the earlier meaning of ‘aforethought’) and significantly more by way of preplanning than premeditation connotes today (premeditation having in the meantime suffered a semantic erosion of its own). The word ‘aforethought’ today is devoid not simply of an ordinary, layman’s meaning but of any meaning at all, even as a term of art. The word ‘aforethought’ is today an absolutely useless appendage on our law. It has over the centuries been utterly drained of any meaning whatsoever. As a word of no utility but with an ever-present potential for confusion (some may innocently think that ‘aforethought’ means aforethought), it should be struck from the lexicon of our homicide law.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority““Following the court’s instructions, the exchange that occurred between appellant’s counsel and the trial judge is enlightening: ‘With regard to your definition of murder in the first definition, Your Honor gave — you said it was killing with malice. You did not use the phrase ‘with malice aforethought’ as a distinction between — THE COURT: I don’t know what ‘aforethought’ is.’ We applaud both the candor and the correctness of the statement. As of the Twentieth Century at least, the word ‘aforethought’ is absolutely devoid of any meaning whatsoever.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.