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474 Pa. 559

379 A.2d 96

Commonwealth v. Smith

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania

Decided October 7, 1977

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania · decided 1977-10-07

Relies on Commonwealth v. Garcia

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1977-10-07

How this case has been cited

Cited by 34 later decisions — most recently June 2014 · most notably Commonwealth v. Gartner (1977), Commonwealth v. Fletcher (2009)

32 state decisions

22019771980199020002010decided

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.

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

NIX, Justice,

¶1concurring and dissenting.

¶2To my knowledge this is the first instance in the history of American jurisprudence where the concept of protecting the rights of an accused has been so distorted as to result in the award of a new trial because a directed verdict of not guilty of one of the charges was entered. If the fallacy of their logic is not readily apparent from the absurdity of the result reached in this case, any further attempt to persuade the *563majority to reconsider its position would obviously be an exercise in futility. See generally my dissent in Commonwealth v. Garcia, 474 Pa. 449, 378 A.2d 1199.

¶3I would affirm the judgment of sentence for both the weapons offense convictions and the voluntary manslaughter conviction.

¶4Today’s result grants an appellant a new trial because the trial judge directed the jury to find the accused not guilty of the crime of involuntary manslaughter. I can think of no better illustration of the absurd results that we may continue to expect if the majority persists in the present course as to when a charge for involuntary manslaughter is required. See generally Commonwealth v. Garcia, 474 Pa. 449, 378 A.2d 1199 (1977) (Dissenting Opinion, Nix, J.).

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