Commonwealth v. Simmons’s Empirical Analysis
1984
Citation profile
24 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 24 later decisions — most recently April 2014
24 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. Hubbard · Commonwealth v. Myrick · Commonwealth v. McKenna · Commonwealth v. Black · Commonwealth v. Cropper
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 24 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“(a) the slayer was free from fault in provoking or continuing the difficulty which resulted in the slaying; (b) that the slayer must have reasonably believed that he was in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm, and that there was a necessity to use such force to save himself therefrom; and (c) the slayer did not violate any duty to retreat or to avoid the danger.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“It is of course elementary that issues not preserved for appellate review or, even if preserved at the trial level, not raised by a party on appeal, will not be considered by an appellate court . . . an appellate court is not to raise sua sponte issues which it perceives in the record where, as here, those issues are not presented at the appeal level.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage
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.