Commonwealth v. Collins’s Empirical Analysis
1975
Citation profile
84 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 84 later decisions — most recently July 2009 · most notably Commonwealth v. Hubbard (1977), Commonwealth v. Story (1978)
84 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. Potter · Commonwealth v. Davis · Commonwealth v. Lipscomb · Commonwealth v. Revty · Commonwealth v. Toth
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 84 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““(a) The prosecutor may argue all reasonable inferences from evidence in the record. It is unprofessional conduct for the prosecutor intentionally to misstate the evidence or mislead the jury as to the inferences it may draw. (b) It is unprofessional conduct for the prosecutor to express his personal belief or opinion as to the truth or falsity of any testimony or evidence or the guilt of the defendant. (c) The prosecutor should not use arguments calculated to inflame the passions or prejudices of the jury. (d) The prosecutor should refrain from argument which would divert the jury from its duty to decide the case on the evidence, by injecting issues broader than the guilt or innocence of the accused under the controlling law, or by making predictions of the consequences of the jury’s verdict.””
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“We must first be able to declare a belief that the error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt before it will be held harmless and a judgment of sentence affirmed. Furthermore, the burden of establishing that the error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt must be borne by the prosecution. Applying this two part analysis in Davis we said that if there is a reasonable possibility that the error “might have contributed to the conviction ... might have moved ‘the minds of an average jury’ toward conviction ...” the error cannot be held harmless.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“[a] reading of the record discloses that the misconduct of the prosecutor was not limited to isolated moments of error in the heat of trial advocacy. The record is replete with instances of prosecutorial misconduct which permit only one reasonable conclusion: from the very beginning of the trial, the prosecutor adopted a strategy calculated to try the case on his own terms rather than within the rules of evidence and the standards of professional conduct.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.