State v. Russo’s Empirical Analysis
1987
Citation profile
1 federal appellate · 42 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 44 later decisions — most recently July 2022 · most notably Pele Defense Fund v. Paty (1992), State v. Pinero (1989)
1 federal appellate · 42 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 State v. O'DANIEL · State v. Russo · United States v. Richard T. Gosser, United States of America v. Donald J. Pinciotti, United States of America v. Ted Maison · State v. Horn · State v. Warner
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 44 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[i]ts roots are lodged in the common law where a person who “kill[ed] another without malice aforethought, under the sudden impulse of passion, excited by provocation or other adequate cause, by the party killed, of a nature tending to disturb the judgment and mental faculties, and weaken the possession of self-control of the killing party, [was] not guilty of murder, but manslaughter.””
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“A person commits the offense of Manslaughter if he recklessly causes the death of another person; or in a prosecution for murder it is a defense, which reduces the offense to Manslaughter, that the defendant was, at the time he caused the death of the other person, under the influence of extreme mental or emotional disturbance for which there is a reasonable explanation. The reasonableness of the explanation shall be determined from the viewpoint of a person in the defendant’s situation under the circumstances as he believed them to be.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. State v. Pinero · State v. Kalani“The [common-law] rule that provocation could, within narrow bounds, reduce murder to manslaughter, represented a limited concession to human weakness. While [Hawaii’s statute] relaxes the rigorous objectivity of the common-law doctrine, it still requires that the actor’s emotional distress be based on “reasonable explanation or excuse”. This key phrase preserves the essentially objective character of the inquiry and erects a barrier against debilitating individualization of the legal standard. [[Image here]] Granted, [Russo] may have been mentally or emotionally disturbed; but nothing Russo offered ... provided “a reasonable explanation or excuse” for his conduct under any test of reasonableness.... A ruling that evidence of this nature ... furnishes a basis for mitigating the offense of murder to manslaughter would undermine the normative message of the criminal law[.]”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Xi Van Ha v. State
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.