7 Va. App. 385 - Spain v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1988
Citation profile
26 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 26 later decisions — most recently March 2013 · most notably State v. Greco (1990), Commonwealth v. Jenkins (1998)
26 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 North Carolina v. Pearce · United States v. Jorn · Turner v. Murray · Higginbotham v. Commonwealth · Fitzgerald v. Virginia
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 26 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Where a person . . . engages in [felonious] activity . . . and homicide . . . results, the malice inherent in the [original felony] provides the malice prerequisite to a finding that the homicide was murder. And, all of the criminal participants in the initial felony may be found guilty of the felony-murder of the victim so long as the homicide was within the res gestae of the initial felony.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“Murder, other than capital murder, by poison, lying in wait, imprisonment, starving, or by any willful, deliberate, and premeditated killing, or in the commission of, or attempt to commit, arson, rape, forcible sodomy, inanimate object sexual penetration, robbery, burglary or abduction, except as provided in § 18.2-31, is murder of the first degree, punishable as a Class 2 felony.”
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.