Commonwealth v. Cross’s Empirical Analysis
1985
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 31 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 36 later decisions — most recently May 2017 · most notably Commonwealth v. Abu-Jamal (1989), Zettlemoyer v. Fulcomer (1991)
3 federal appellate · 31 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 Chimel v. California · Gregg v. Georgia · Furman v. Georgia · Lockett v. Ohio · Woodson v. North Carolina
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 clear import of the first part of subsection (d)(10) is to classify the commission of multiple serious crimes as one of the bases upon which a jury might rest a decision that the crime of which the defendant stands convicted, and for v/hich they are imposing sentence, merits the extreme penalty of death.””
2 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.