436 Pa. Super. 584 - Commonwealth v. Sheppard’s Empirical Analysis
1994
Citation profile
17 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 17 later decisions — most recently May 2019
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. Zettlemoyer · Styer v. Hugo · Klusman v. Bucks County Court of Common Pleas · Johnson v. COM., PA. BD. OF PROB. & PAR. · Commonwealth v. Paquette
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 17 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[a] person who intentionally or knowingly kills an individual commits voluntary manslaughter if at the time of the killing he believes the circumstances to be such that, if they existed, would justify the killing ... but his belief is unreasonable.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“Fourth, the defendant must not have violated any duty to retreat which would have enabled him to avoid the necessity of using such force and would have enabled him to retreat with complete safety. As a general rule, a defendant has a duty to retreat before resorting to deadly force in self-defense if he knows he can avoid the necessity of using such force with complete safety by retreating. However, if the encounter takes place in the defendant’s own dwelling, he has no duty to retreat from his own home unless he was the initial aggressor. [[Image here]] In sum, you cannot find the defendant guilty of murder unless you are satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt first...; or fourth, that the defendant had a duty to retreat and such retreat was possible with complete safety. If you find that any one of these four elements has been established beyond a reasonable doubt, then the defense of justification or justifiable self-defense has not been made out.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“Neither voluntary intoxication nor voluntary drugged condition is a defense to a criminal charge, nor may evidence of such conditions be introduced to negative the element of intent of the offense, except that evidence of such intoxication or drugged condition of the defendant may be offered by the defendant whenever it is relevant to reduce murder from a higher degree to a lower degree of murder.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
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.