Commonwealth v. Matchett’s Empirical Analysis
1982
Citation profile
6 district · 140 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 152 later decisions — most recently February 2022 · most notably Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, Inc. v. Blake (1994), Commonwealth v. Mello (1995)
6 district · 140 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 Chambers v. Maroney · South Dakota v. Opperman · Yates v. United States · Commonwealth v. Latimore · People v. Washington
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 152 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“"A felony-murder rule that punishes all homicides committed in the perpetration of a felony whether the death is intentional, unintentional or accidental, without the necessity of proving the relation of the perpetrator's state of mind to the homicide, violates the most fundamental principle of the criminal law'criminal liability for causing a particular result is not justified in the absence of some culpable mental state in respect to that result.'"”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage“[t]he effect of the felony-murder rule is to substitute the intent to commit the underlying felony for the malice aforethought required for murder.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“unless the jury [found] that the extortion involved circumstances demonstrating the defendant's conscious disregard of the risk to human life.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
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.