Commonwealth v. Nixon’s Empirical Analysis
1998
Citation profile
9 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 10 later decisions — most recently July 2013
9 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 Conway v. Statesman Mortgage Co. · Commonwealth v. Tuladziecki · Esparsen v. United States · Commonwealth v. Williams · 345 Pa. Super. 10 - Commonwealth v. Barnhart
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 10 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“We find that [Child Protective Services Law] and the involuntary manslaughter statutes are not in conflict in their plain meaning, as well as under a constitutional analysis. A plain reading of the statutes shows that an act which does not qualify as child abuse may still be done in a manner which causes death and thus qualifies as involuntary manslaughter. This precise situation occurred in this case. While the Nixons were not considered child abusers for treating their children through spiritual healing, when their otherwise lawful course of conduct led to a child’s death, they were guilty of involuntary manslaughter.”
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.