60 Md. App. 539 - Hurley v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1984
Citation profile
4 federal appellate · 29 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 39 later decisions — most recently March 2018 · most notably Government of the Virgin Islands v. Harris (1991), Whittlesey v. State (1992)
4 federal appellate · 29 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 Jackson v. Virginia · Williams v. United States · Tichnell v. State · 37 Cal. 2d 614 - People v. Cullen · Thomas v. State
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 39 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Our decision in Lemons and here — that failure to recover the victim’s body is not fatal to the State’s case in a homicide prosecution — is in accord with other states that have addressed a similar situation. As the California Court of Appeals succinctly stated: “The fact that a murderer may successfully dispose of the body of the victim does not entitle him to acquittal. That is one form of success for which society has no reward.” We concur with this view and with the admonition espoused by the Appellate Division of New Jersey’s Superior Court when it stated that “successful concealment or destruction of the victim’s body should not preclude prosecution of his or her killer where proof of guilt can be established beyond a reasonable doubt.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“where no body is found). 65 We find particularly significant the disruption of Mrs. Harris's habits and plans, such as her promise to deliver packages upon her arrival at St. Thomas as well as her failure to maintain regular contact with family members and friends. This evidence negates the possibility that Mrs. Harris may have abandoned her family. 66 Worldwide communication and travel today are so facile that a jury may properly take into account the unlikelihood that an absent person, in view of his health, habits, disposition and personal relationships would voluntarily flee,”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“In every Maryland case reported thus far involving the corroboration rule in the context of a homicide, the victim’s body had been recovered and there was other independent evidence, either direct or circumstantial, to suggest that the death was not the result of accident or suicide. This, of course, does not imply that the inability to produce a body is an insuperable obstacle, in itself, to the obtention and sustention of a murder conviction. This Court, as well as the Court of Appeals, has repeatedly said that the independent evidence of the corpus delicti “may be circumstantial in nature when direct evidence is not available.” ... Moreover, courts from other jurisdictions that have been confronted with the “missing body” problem have unanimously concluded that the death of the alleged victim need not be evidenced directly by the production of the body. Nevertheless, it is clear from these cases that there must be independent evidence, at least circumstantial in nature, that relates to both elements of the corpus delicti. [Internal citations omitted.]”
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.