Hayes v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

2 state decisions

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 2 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “The difficulty [with Hayes’s argument] is that the language of the statute is plain and unambiguous. A person cannot be a persistent felony offender until he stands convicted of a second felony, and the statute provides that he is a persistent felony offender if at that time he is more than 21 years old. It makes no mention of age at the time of the commission of the second felony. [Hayes] would have us rewrite the statute to read in effect that a person is a persistent felony offender in the 2nd degree who stands convicted of a felony committed after he became 21 years of age if he had been convicted previously of a felony. We cannot take such liberties in construing a statute when the words used in the statute are not ambiguous, and the construction of the plain meaning of the words as written in the act does not reduce it to an absurdity. The General Assembly may have simply intended that no one under the age of 21 years at the time of trial should be weighed down with an enhanced sentence as a persistent felony offender. If it is the intention of the legislature that no one who is less than 21 years of age at the time of the commission of a second felony should be proceeded against as a persistent felony offender, that intention should be expressed by the legislature in the statute.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Harris v. Commonwealth