Commonwealth v. Sparrow’s Empirical Analysis
1977
Citation profile
4 federal appellate · 158 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 164 later decisions — most recently November 2011 · most notably Commonwealth v. Gravely (1979), Commonwealth v. Sell (1983)
4 federal appellate · 158 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 North Carolina v. Pearce · Benton v. Maryland · United States v. Wilson · Sansone v. United States · Berra v. United States
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 164 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“§ 4701. Murder of the first and second degree All murder which shall be perpetrated by means of poison, or by lying in wait, or by any other kind of willful, deliberate and premeditated killing, or which shall be committed in the perpetration of, or attempting to perpetrate any arson, rape, robbery, burglary, or kidnapping, shall be murder in the first degree. All other kinds of murder shall be murder in the second degree.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“As applied in Pennsylvania, common law felony-murder is a means of imputing malice where it may not exist expressly. This degree of commonality, and the circumstance that both crimes were committed in the course of a single “episode”, cannot obscure the obvious fact that robbery is not a lesser degree of murder; it is a totally discrete offense. Both our common law and statutory law has said that when an unjustified killing occurs in the course of committing another specified type of crime, the homicide is murder in the first degree. The societal interest behind such a doctrine is the preservation of human life, so often casually forfeited in the commission of crimes of violence. That purpose would be ill-served by a rule which would say to a felon that “if you happen to kill the victim of your robbery (or your rape, or burglary, or kidnapping, or arson) you will not be punished for the underlying crime.” Sparrow committed two distinct crimes, robbery and murder; one was a stealing, the other a killing. There was no merger of these crimes, and he cannot complain that he was sentenced for both.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. Gillespie v. Ryan“There was ample evidence in the case (such, for example, as Sparrow’s announced purpose, “I’m going to get me a homicide”) from which the jury could find that the slaying of Joseph Jaworski was wilful, deliberate and premeditated. Were that the basis of the verdict of murder in the first degree, there would be no room for the double jeopardy argument. But the jurors were charged that they could also return that verdict if they determined that the killing occurred during the commission of a robbery. Since there is no way of knowing on which theory the jury proceeded, we must consider appellant’s contention that the robbery offense, if it lay behind the murder verdict, merged into the offense of murder and is not separately punishable.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
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.