68 Md. App. 368 - Stackowitz v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1986
Citation profile
8 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 8 later decisions — most recently August 2011
8 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 General Motors Corp. v. Lahocki · Williams v. State · 43 Md. App. 238 - Gray v. State · Young v. State · State v. Smith
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 8 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“It thus follows, at least as a matter of statutory construction if not in a more fundamental jurisprudential sense, that a person cannot be convicted of theft for taking or assuming control over something that has no value whatever. And, given the nature of the crime of attempt, if stealing something that has no value is not a crime, it further follows that attempting to steal something that has no value is likewise not a crime. We are spared in this case the need to ponder the abstraction of whether there can, in law or in fact, actually be anything of tangible existence that really has no value. We leave that to the economists or to another court.... There is a significant difference between a showing that property having some intrinsic value was taken, although the precise measurement of that value is not established, and an affirmative charge that what was taken or intended to be taken was, in fact, valueless.... That there is some value ... is an element of the crime [of attempted theft], for, if the item at issue [gasoline] has no value whatever, it is not ‘property’ under the [theft] statute. The difference between zero and something, in other words, is of quite different character than that between something and something more.”
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.