Commonwealth v. Burns’s Empirical Analysis
1980
Citation profile
28 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 28 later decisions — most recently December 2017 · most notably Commonwealth v. Sepulveda (2012), Commonwealth v. Stonehouse (1989)
28 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. Black · Commonwealth v. Smith
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 28 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Where an accused raises a defense of self-defense, the burden of the prosecution is to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the killing was not done in self-defense. . . . The Commonwealth sustains its burden if it proves any of the following: that the slayer was not free from fault in provoking or continuing the difficulty which resulted in the slaying; that the slayer did not reasonably believe that she was in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm, and that it was necessary to kill in order to save herself therefrom; or that the slayer violated a duty to retreat or avoid the danger.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“we must view that evidence in the light most favorable to the verdict winner, here the Commonwealth; all reasonable inferences which may be drawn from the evidence must be drawn favorably to the verdict winner as well.”
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.