Commonwealth v. Edwards’s Empirical Analysis
1959
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 24 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 35 later decisions — most recently May 2011 · most notably Commonwealth v. Pierce (1987), State v. Hutchinson (1980)
3 federal appellate · 24 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. Kloiber · Commonwealth v. Donough · Commonwealth v. Flax · Commonwealth v. Patskin
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 35 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Even, if in a hypothetical case, the evidence of guilt piles as high as Mt. Everest on Matterhorn, even if the District Attorney conscientiously believes the defendant to be as guilty as Cain, and no matter with what certainty the Judge views the culpability of the accused at the bar, the defendant is still entitled to all the safeguards of a fair trial as announced in the Constitution and the law of the land.”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage““But it must still be left to the jury to decide whether an admitted slayer had or did not have justification or excuse for what he did. “. . . The presumption of innocence is not merely a papier-maché figure for dramatic display in the courtroom; it is a reality without which trials become mere playacting with the verdict residing in the judge’s pocket before the' jury is sworn. “. . . To allow a glaring omission in a judge’s charge to go uncorrected would mean that in future trials where the evidence to convict would not be so overwhelming as the District Attorney and the lower Court believe it to be in this case, a similar omission could not- be complained of because this case would be cited as a precedent. “. . . The law of the Commonwealth places in the hands of the jury the exclusive responsibility of deciding guilt, and the Court may not restrict the jury’s possible conclusions to a number which excludes the very important one of not guilty. Otherwise, the law would authorize a Trial Court to give binding instructions in favor of the Commonwealth which, of course, is not only ^unthinking’ but ‘unthinkable.’ ””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“(I)t still must be left to the jury to decide whether an admitted slayer had or did not have justification or excuse for what he did.... It is the trial and the trial alone which decides whether a defendant is assuredly guilty.... (N)o matter with what certainty the Judge views the culpability of the accused at the bar, the defendant is still entitled to all of the safeguards of a fair trial as announced in the Constitution, and the law of the land.”
2 later decisions 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.