Commonwealth v. Bostic’s Empirical Analysis
1983
Citation profile
34 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 36 later decisions — most recently March 2021 · most notably Commonwealth v. Wright (1985), 339 Pa. Super. 32 - Commonwealth v. Hernandez (1985)
34 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 Blockburger v. United States · North Carolina v. Pearce · Brown v. Ohio · Missouri v. Hunter · Whalen 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 36 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[t]he double jeopardy clause serves principally as a restraint on courts and prosecutors — it does not restrain the legislature in its role in defining crimes and fixing penalties. The intent of the double jeopardy provisions is to prevent courts from imposing, and prosecutors from seeking, more than one punishment under a particular legislative enactment, and, where consecutive sentences are imposed at a single trial, to prevent the court from exceeding its legislative authorization by imposing multiple punishments for the same offense. ... [T]he Blockburger test is merely a tool of statutory construction whereby the courts can determine whether, in the absence of legislative expression to the contrary, the legislature intended to prescribe multiple punishments under two separate statutory provisions for what might arguably be considered the ‘same offense.’”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“The applicable rule is that where the same act or transaction constitutes a violation of two distinct statutory provisions, the test to be applied to determine whether there are two offenses or only one is whether each provision requires proof of a fact which the other does not.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
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.