Commonwealth v. Weinstein’s Empirical Analysis
1982
Citation profile
6 federal appellate · 111 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 123 later decisions — most recently May 2019 · most notably Commonwealth v. Zettlemoyer (1982), Commonwealth v. Travaglia (1995)
6 federal appellate · 111 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 Morissette v. United States · Dennis v. United States · Durham v. United States · Cogdell v. United States · United States v. Brawner
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 123 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“mental disorders affecting the cognitive functions necessary to formulate a specific intent,”
6 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“At trial for murder generally, the Commonwealth must establish (1) that a human being has unlawfully been killed, (2) that the person accused did the killing, (3) that the accused is of sound memory and discretion, knows right from wrong and appreciates the nature and quality of his act, i.e., sane under Pennsylvania’s M’Naghten standard, and (4) that the killing was done with malice aforethought. Malice aforethought is the general intent prerequisite to a finding of murder. It distinguishes murder from any other type of homicide and includes cruelty, recklessness of consequences and a mind regardless of social duty.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“The law, in its effort to shape a rational social policy, grounded in the broadly shared assumptions of the individuals who make up society, cannot admit that acts an individual carefully plans and carries out to advance his own desire, when he knows those acts will result in the death of another human being, will not be punished simply because of the intensity or strangeness of that desire. Such an admission proceeds imperceptibly to the absurd result that the more strange and brutal the act the more likely the actor is to be relieved of its criminal consequences. Along the psychoanalytic continum the outrageous proves the innocence. In an oddly circular fashion the act establishes its cause as mental illness and the mental illness determines the act. Such analysis may be medically useful. It is not legally useful.”
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.