Commonwealth v. Kelleher’s Empirical Analysis
1985
Citation profile
2 district · 9 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 11 later decisions — most recently January 2006
2 district · 9 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 In the Matter of Samuel Winship · Sandstrom v. Montana · Mullaney v. Wilbur · Francis v. Franklin · Hullum v. United States
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 11 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“judge specifically emphasized to the jury the requirement of 'moral certainty’ in reaching a decision”). But see Commonwealth v. Kelleher, 395 Mass. 821, 826 , 482 N.E.2d 804 (1985) ("The judge’s allusion to ‘proof to a moral certainty’ did not suffice to repair the defective instructions as to reasonable doubt”); Commonwealth v. Rembiszewski, 391 Mass. 123, 134 , 461 N.E.2d 201 (1984) ("the jury were instructed to treat proof beyond a reasonable doubt, proof to a moral certainty, and proof to a degree of certainty that the jurors would want in making decisions about their futures as equivalent concepts. This was constitutional error”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Smith v. Butler
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.