Commonwealth v. Williams’s Empirical Analysis
1974
Citation profile
46 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 46 later decisions — most recently August 2004 · most notably Commonwealth v. Wilson (1996), Commonwealth v. Paolello (1995)
46 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 In the Matter of Samuel Winship · Commonwealth v. Kravitz · Commonwealth v. Burns · Commonwealth v. Homeyer · Commonwealth v. Carroll
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 46 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““ . . . The task of the appellate court in reviewing the sufficiency claim is to determine whether, accepting as true all the evidence and all reasonable inferences therefrom, upon which, if believed, the jury could properly have based its verdict, it is sufficient in law to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty of the crime or crimes of which he has been convicted.” Commonwealth v. Williams, 455 Pa. 539, 547 , 316 A.2d 888, 892 (1974).”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage““To permit evidence of a medical opinion as to cause of death to be considered by the trier of fact it must be shown only that the witness entertained a reasonable degree of medical certainty for his conclusions. The test of reasonable doubt is a legal one and it is the test that the jury must use in determining whether the expert opinion taken together with all of the other evidence in the case warrants the finding of the cause of death as suggested by the expert, beyond a reasonable doubt. Commonwealth v. Webb, 449 Pa. 490, 496 , 296 A.2d 734 (1972).””
1 later decision quote this exact passage“That the killing was willful and deliberate and but a part of a well-planned attempt to kill and conceal is suggested by the well-conceived attempt at deception practiced by the appellant. The care with which the plan to divert suspicion from appellant was executed and the obvious attention to details contradict the possibility of a spontaneous cover-up following an accidental or unintentional killing. Under these facts a jury was able to conclude that the entire design including the killing had received much prior thought and planning.”
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.