Rutherford v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

3 state decisions

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 3 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““No one saw, or professed to have seen, both the deceased and the appellant at the moment when the shooting was done, or for some moments before. . . . In that case the facts attending the killing must be ascertained wholly from circumstances. “The homicide may then have been excusable self-defense, manslaughter, or murder. The facts attending the killing must be ascertained in order to ascertain to .which category the killing belongs. It is the province of the jury to ascertain these facts, and the court erred in refusing to instruct in the law of manslaughter. In doing so the court took upon itself to decide that no facts existed which could reduce the killing to manslaughter. That action, as stated by the learned judge, was based on the ground that there was no evidence whatever ‘going to show that the killing was done in sudden heat and passion,’ and therefore an instruction as to the law of manslaughter would be abstract and misleading. “The same reasoning would equally apply to an instruction in regard to the law of self-defense, and the instruction given on that subject might have been refused with equal propriety. If the jury had a right from the circumstances in evidence before them to inquire whether the killing was done in self-defense, they had an equal right to inquire whether it was not done under circumstances which made it manslaughter. “When no witness introduced on the trial saw the homicide committed, or saw the parties after they met on the occasion when t”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. State v. Truskett