Commonwealth v. Speight’s Empirical Analysis
2004
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 37 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 46 later decisions — most recently December 2025 · most notably Commonwealth v. Carson (2006), Commonwealth v. Tedford (2008)
2 federal appellate · 37 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 Strickland v. Washington · North Carolina v. Pearce · Blackledge v. Perry · United States v. Goodwin · Morgan v. Illinois
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 46 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“A court may not punish an Appellant for exercising appellate rights. In cases where there is no actual vindictiveness, but instead there is an apprehension on the part of a defendant to exercise his legal rights due to a fear of retaliation from the court, a presumption of vindictiveness may arise. In such cases, a court may reverse the defendant’s conviction only if it applies a presumption of vindictiveness, which would then be applicable to all cases. A court may adopt the presumption of vindictiveness only where there is a reasonable likelihood of vindictiveness. The inquiry is whether there is a reasonable danger a state may have retaliated against the accused for exercising a legal right.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“Due process of law ... requires that vindictiveness against a defendant for having successfully attacked his first conviction must play no part in the sentence he receives after a new trial. And since the fear of such vindictiveness may unconstitutionally deter a defendant’s exercise of the right to appeal or collaterally attack his first conviction, due process also requires that a defendant be freed of apprehension of such a retaliatory motivation on the part of the sentencing judge.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“Thus, in order to find a Defendant guilty of murder in the first degree, you must find that the Defendant caused the death of another person, or that an accomplice or co-conspirator caused the death of another person. That is, you must find that the Defendant's act or the act of an accomplice or co-conspirator is the legal cause of death of [the victim], and thereafter you must determine if the killing was intentional.”
1 later decision 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.