Commonwealth v. Wayne’s Empirical Analysis
1998
Citation profile
6 federal appellate · 80 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 96 later decisions — most recently November 2025 · most notably Commonwealth v. Chester (1999), Commonwealth v. Murphy (2004)
6 federal appellate · 80 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 Local 408, International Brotherhood of Teamsters v. National Labor Relations Board · Commodity Futures Trading Commission v. Weintraub · Commonwealth v. Zettlemoyer · Commonwealth v. Blair · Shieh v. State Bar
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 96 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[t]he conspiracy had only one object, the deliberate decision to take a life[, and] [o]nce this jury determined that appellant was guilty of conspiracy, given the sole object of that conspiracy, the only logical conclusion to reach is that this jury also determined, beyond a reasonable doubt, that appellant possessed the specific intent to kill.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“The general rule of law [in Pennsylvania] pertaining to the culpability of conspirators is that each individual member of the conspiracy is criminally responsible for the acts of his co-conspirators committed in furtherance of the conspiracy.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[t]o be guilty of first degree murder, each co-conspirator must individually be found to possess the mental state necessary to establish first degree murder — the specific intent to kill.”
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.