Commonwealth v. Jermyn’s Empirical Analysis
1987
Citation profile
109 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 113 later decisions — most recently February 2018 · most notably Commonwealth v. Hawkins (1997), Commonwealth v. Tilley (1991)
109 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 Witherspoon v. Illinois · Wainwright v. Witt · Lockhart v. McCree · Local 408, International Brotherhood of Teamsters v. National Labor Relations Board · Rodriguez v. New York
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 113 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The mere fact that counsel may not have posed the specific question as to whether a prospective juror would vote for a sentence of life imprisonment in an appropriate case does not justify the conclusion that counsel failed to assure that a fair and impartial jury was selected. Such a talismanic requirement would clearly place form above substance.”
8 later decisions quote this exact passage“[a] criminal homicide ... committed by an intentional,” i.e.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage“Appellant elected to take the witness stand, not to testify as to either the circumstances surrounding the crime or his mental condition during the commission of the crime, but to read a prepared statement, in verse form, directed at the jury. The obvious purpose of this statement was to dramatize appellant’s purported delusions and display his demeanor, thus inducing a subjective response in the minds of the jurors as to his mental condition. Such a demonstration would have been subject to no evidentiary constraints and would have insulated the underlying testimonial assertion, i.e., that appellant was legally insane at the time of the crime, from meaningful cross-examination.”
2 later decisions 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.