53 Md. App. 171 - Walker v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1982
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 6 district · 117 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 135 later decisions — most recently August 2022 · most notably Stebbing v. State (1984), Hardy v. State (1984)
2 federal appellate · 6 district · 117 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 · Brinegar v. United States · Gregg v. Georgia · Furman v. Georgia · Draper 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 135 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[i]t is purely a question of reading legislative intent. If the Legislature intended two crimes arising out of a single act to be punished separately, we defer to that legislated choice. If the Legislature intended but a single punishment, we defer to that legislated choice. If we are uncertain as to what the Legislature intended, we turn to the so-called “Rule of Lenity,” by which we give the defendant the benefit of the doubt.”
9 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Quansah v. State · Pair v. State“[Statutory assaults have not preempted the field of all serious and aggravated assaults. Our Legislature has cut out of the herd for special treatment four assaults where the aggravating factor is a special mens rea or specific intent. This by no means exhausts the category of more grievous and blameworthy assaults. The aggravating factor in a particular case might well be the modality of an assault, and not its mens rea— assault with a deadly weapon, assault by poison ..., assault by bomb.... Even where ... there simply has been no specific intent, a brutal beating that leaves its victim blinded, crippled, disfigured, in a wheelchair for life, in a psychiatric ward for life, is severely aggravated.... Maryland has not dealt with this form of aggravation legislatively but has left it to the discretion of common law sentencing.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“As to excessiveness (proportionality), that can never be litigated in the abstract but must be assessed on a case-by-case basis. That an extremely lengthy prison sentence might be disproportionately excessive for most common law assault convictions does not establish, as a bright-line formula, that it would be disproportionately excessive for all common law assault convictions. We measure proportionality not by comparing the sentence with the label of the crime (that the sentence be within legal limits is a legal problem, not a constitutional problem) but by comparing the sentence with the behavior of the criminal and the consequences of his act. As an abstract proposition, no term of years for common law assault is per se and universally unconstitutional.”
3 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.