Commonwealth v. Murray’s Empirical Analysis
1988
Citation profile
18 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 18 later decisions — most recently March 2016
18 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. Donovan · Commonwealth v. Stasiun · Commonwealth v. Beal · Commonwealth v. Johnson · People v. Cox
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 18 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The question before us is one of legislative intent. The intent of the Legislature . . . would be frustrated if a person who steals a large sum of money (more than $100) from a single victim in several separate takings of small (less than $100) sums, could escape prosecution as a felon .... Surely, however, it does not follow that the Commonwealth must charge successive thefts from a single victim pursuant to a single scheme as one crime. Such a requirement would also frustrate clear legislative intent. It is not reasonable to believe that . . . the Legislature intended that a person who steals $4,000,000 from his employer by 180 separate takings is subject to no greater maximum penalty than is one who steals $101 from his employer on one occasion.””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Williams
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.