Commonwealth v. Kellam’s Empirical Analysis
1998
Citation profile
8 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 9 later decisions — most recently February 2018
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 Commonwealth v. Simmons · Commonwealth v. Brown · Commonwealth v. Baker · Commonwealth v. MacK · Commonwealth v. Michael
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 9 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[T]hird-degree murder is a killing done with legal malice but without the specific intent to kill required in first-degree murder. Malice consists of a wickedness of disposition, hardness of heart, cruelty, recklessness of consequences, and a mind regardless of social duty. Malice exists where the principal acts in gross deviation from the standard of reasonable care, failing to perceive that such actions might create a substantial and unjustifiable risk of death or serious bodily injury.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“In this age where children reside in increasingly complex family situations, we fail to understand why criminal liability should be strictly limited to biological or adoptive parents.... We therefore hold that whenever a person is placed in control and supervision of a child, that person has assumed such a status relationship to the child so as to impose a duty to act.”
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.