Commonwealth v. Dyer’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

3 federal appellate · 23 state decisions

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 26 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““The bodies of the four victims were found on the morning of September 22, 1980 in a room at the rear of Sammy White’s Brighton Bowl in Boston. Each of the victims had been shot in the head with a .38 caliber handgun, and each had received multiple blunt injuries to the head. The victims were found lying on the floor with their hands restrained behind their backs. The bowling alley’s safe had been opened, and approximately $4,000 was missing. “In his opening statement, the prosecutor told the jury that the Commonwealth would prove that Dyer alone committed the murders, and the evidence the Commonwealth offered did not specifically implicate anyone other than the petitioner. During his cross-examination of two of the Commonwealth’s expert witnesses, however, the defendant’s counsel repeatedly asked the witness whether it was not more likely that the murders were committed by a number of persons rather than by a lone gunman. The witnesses declined to offer an opinion on this question. “After closing arguments, just before he charged the jury, the trial judge told the prosecutor and the defense attorney for the first time that he intended to charge the jury on the law of joint enterprise. Over the objections of the defendant, he did so charge, as follows: “ ‘Now ladies and gentlemen, some suggestion has been made that perhaps these crimes were committed by more than one person. This raises the concept known as the law of joint enterprise. Under the theory of joint enterprise, a ”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Dyer v. Ponte