Commonwealth v. Qualls’s Empirical Analysis
1997
Citation profile
2 district · 27 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 29 later decisions — most recently November 2015 · most notably Commonwealth v. Wilson (1998), 54 Cal. 4th 758 - People v. Riccardi (2012)
2 district · 27 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 Bates v. State Bar · Johnson v. United States · United States v. Brown · Commonwealth v. Trefethen · Harsh v. Illinois Terminal Railroad
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 29 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The state-of-mind exception to the hearsay rule calls for admission of evidence of a murder victim’s state of mind as proof of the defendant’s motive to kill the victim when and only when there also is evidence that the defendant was aware of that state of mind at the time of the crime and would be likely to respond to it. ... A murder victim’s attitude of contempt or hostility toward the defendant, when it is known to the defendant, would constitute some evidence which, augmented by other evidence, might warrant a fact finder’s determination that the defendant responded by killing the victim. However, a victim’s contempt for the defendant or hostile attitude toward him, unknown to the defendant, would be irrelevant and inadmissible at the defendant’s trial for murder.””
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.