Commonwealth v. Cruz’s Empirical Analysis
1999
Citation profile
19 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 21 later decisions — most recently January 2022
19 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. Wright · Commonwealth v. Welansky · Ginsburg v. Stern · Commonwealth v. Appleby · Commonwealth v. Raymond
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 21 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[t]he final element of the crime of felony murder, here, that the Commonwealth must prove, is that in the circumstances of this case, the defendant committed or attempted to commit the felony in question with a conscious disregard for the risk to human life. The crime, the felony of burglary with assault on an occupant, is a crime that is defined in our law as inherently dangerous to human life. If you find that the Commonwealth has proved beyond a reasonable doubt, that the defendant, Gabriel Cruz, committed, as a joint venturer, the unlawful killing of Eve Rojas, while in the course of committing the offense of a burglary with an assault on an occupant, you would be warranted in finding, without more, that he acted with a conscious disregard for the risk to human life, because that particular felony is inherently dangerous to human life.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Cruz v. Maloney“it is readily apparent that a unanimous jury concluded that the defendant committed each of the . . . charged acts”
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.