Commonwealth v. James’s Empirical Analysis
1969
Citation profile
17 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 19 later decisions — most recently September 1994
17 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. Drum · Commonwealth v. Heller · Commonwealth v. Collazo · Commonwealth v. Smith · Commonwealth v. Vassar
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 19 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Number twelve: All homicides are not necessarily punishable as murder or manslaughter. There are circumstances under which the Idlling of a human being may be excused. One such circumstance is where the killing takes place under a reasonable apprehension that one’s life is in danger and that the killing is necessary to prevent death or great bodily harm. That is the defense offered by the defendant in this case. His contention is that he wanted to talk to the decedent, that he knew that the decedent had a reputation for being a violent person, that he further believed that the decedent would be surrounded by his friends of similar reputation. The defendant further states that he was carrying this gun for self-protection. In viewing that statement, it would be proper for you to consider the character and nature of a neighborhood in which the defendant lived. “I so charge you. “Number thirteen: It is a broad general principle that if the defendant, at the time of the occurrence, which is now being examined, was in actual peril of his life or of great bodily harm, or if the conditions there present created a reasonable belief founded on facts as they then appeared, that he was in such danger, and if there was no other means of escape, the killing would be excusable as having been done in self-defense. “I so charge you. “Number fourteen: If the conditions as they existed were both adequate to raise and sufficient to justify a belief in the necessity of killing Lionel Chandler, i”
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.