Commonwealth v. Clinton’s Empirical Analysis
1958
Citation profile
102 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 102 later decisions — most recently December 2014 · most notably Commonwealth v. Simpson (1970), Commonwealth v. Townsend (1968)
102 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 Commonwealth v. Bausewine
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 102 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Reasonable doubt is neither excessively timid nor excessively bold. It is not to be gauged by the actions of the man who would hesitate to cross a bridge resting on concrete piers and suspended by indestructible steel; nor by the actions of the man who would cross a bridge against fifty angels warning him that the piers had crumbled and the spans had fallen. Reasonable doubt is the doubt of a reasonable man. When the reason, like a bird flying over the sea, looks in vain for a substantial object on which to rest and fold its wings of perplexity, it can be said that the mind is in a state of reasonable doubt.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“. . . in a prosecution based upon circumstantial evidence, conviction may not be based upon suspicion or conjecture, but rather the evidence must be such `as reasonably and naturally to justify an inference of the guilt of the accused . . . and of such volume and quality as to overcome the presumption of innocence . . .'”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“[t]he only element of this crime which the Commonwealth proved was that [appellant] was out at night.”
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.