Commonwealth v. Morris’s Empirical Analysis
1981
Citation profile
194 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 196 later decisions — most recently October 2023 · most notably Commonwealth v. Lark (1988), Commonwealth v. Hughes (1989)
194 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 Drew v. United States · Commonwealth v. Wable · Commonwealth v. Peterson · Commonwealth v. Patrick · Commonwealth v. Fortune
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 196 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“allows evidence of other crimes to be introduced to prove (1) motive; (2) intent; (3) absence of mistake or accident; (4) a common scheme, plan or design embracing commission of two or more crimes so related to each other that proof of one tends to prove the others; or (5) to establish the identity of the person charged with the commission of the crime on trial, in other words, where there is such a logical connection between the crimes that proof of one will naturally tend to show that the accused is the person who committed the other.”
27 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““A. Standards “(1) Offenses charged in separate indictments or in-formations may be tried together if: “(a) the evidence of each of the offenses would be admissible in a separate trial for the other and is capable of separation by the jury so that there is no danger of confusion.””
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“The argument against joinder or consolidation is that where a defendant is tried at one trial for several offenses, several kinds of prejudice may occur: (1) The defendant may be confounded in presenting defenses, as where his defense to one charge is inconsistent with his defenses to the others; (2) the jury may use the evidence of one of the offenses to infer a criminal disposition and on the basis of that inference, convict the defendant of the other offenses; and (3) the jury may cumulate the evidence of the various offenses to find guilt when, if the evidence of each offense had been considered separately, it would not so find.”
3 later decisions 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.