Payne v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1983
Citation profile
18 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 18 later decisions — most recently September 2017
18 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 Coleman v. Commonwealth · Brown v. Commonwealth · Marcum v. Commonwealth · Tuttle v. Commonwealth · Satterly v. Commonwealth
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 18 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“It is well settled by this Court that if the evidence warrants instructing on a lesser degree of the offense, the instruction must be given. It is equally well settled that instruction on a lesser degree may be rejected if the evidence does not warrant it.... The same rule should obtain in persistent felony offender cases.... First-degree felony offender is one charge. The fact that two convictions must be proven does not justify breaking down the charge into two parts so as to give the jury the opportunity to pass on each prior conviction in the absence of some evidence bringing one or both prior convictions into dispute.... [W]e adhere to the proposition that the jury was not compelled to believe this evidence and make a finding of guilty, but even though we adhere to this proposition we believe it does not follow that the jury has the right to be capricious and ignore one conviction and believe the other where the convictions are not denied. The two convictions represent the charge, and with no other evidence putting one or both in issue there is no evidentiary basis for instructing on both convictions.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage““A jury is entitled to disbelieve evidence of prior convictions put on by the Commonwealth. [Citations omitted.] However, once the jury is persuaded that the defendant has been convicted of two or more felonies, the language of KRS 532.-080(1) is mandatory: the jury must fix a sentence within the ranges specified in the statute.””
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.