Commonwealth v. Johnston’s Empirical Analysis
1970
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 130 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 139 later decisions — most recently January 2018 · most notably Commonwealth v. Rose (1974), Commonwealth v. Zapata (1972)
3 federal appellate · 130 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 Rivera v. United States · Commonwealth v. Lawrence · Commonwealth v. Wilkes · Commonwealth v. Breyessee · Commonwealth v. Collazo
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 139 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“but a person placed in a position of imminent danger of death or great bodily harm to himself by the wrongful attack of another has no duty to retreat if to do so would increase his own danger of death or great bodily harm.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“would not adopt a rule of law which more easily justifies the taking of a human life.”
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.