Commonwealth v. Floyd’s Empirical Analysis
1984
Citation profile
139 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 141 later decisions — most recently July 2009 · most notably Werts v. Vaughn (2000), Commonwealth v. Durst (1989)
139 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. Stoltzfus · Commonwealth v. Pettus · Commonwealth v. Miller · Commonwealth v. Roots · Commonwealth v. Rawles
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 141 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“It is extremely prejudicial for a prosecutor to importune a jury to base a death sentence upon the chance that a defendant might receive parole, ..., or the possibility of escape from prison, ..., particularly where, as here, the jury was cognizant of the facts that [defendant] had previously been convicted of prison breach and, also, that he had attempted to escape from custody the very morning of the sentencing hearing.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Commonwealth v. Hall“set forth an offer to prove at an appropriate hearing sufficient facts upon which an appellate court can conclude that trial counsel may have, in fact, been ineffective. This Court [our Supreme Court] will no longer consider claims of ineffective assistance of counsel in the abstract.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“was a fair inference from irrefutable evidence, rather than a broad characterization of the whole of the testimony as a `big lie.'”
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.