Brown v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1998
Citation profile
6 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 7 later decisions — most recently December 2022
6 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 Grayned v. City of Rockford · Grayned v. City of Rockford · United States v. National Dairy Products Corp. · State v. Robinson · Commonwealth v. Burge
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 7 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“A person is guilty of murder when ... [including, but not limited to, the operation of a motor vehicle under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to human life, he wantonly engages in conduct which creates a grave risk of death to another person and thereby causes the death of another person.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“[Wantonness] ... presupposes an awareness of the creation of substantial homicidal risk, a risk too great to be deemed justifiable by any valid purpose that the actor's conduct serves. Since risk, however, is a matter of degree and the motives for risk creation may be infinite in variation, some formula is needed to identify the case where [wantonness] should be assimilated to [intention]. The conception that the draft employs is that of extreme indifference to the value of human life. The significance of [intention] is that ... it demonstrates precisely such indifference. Whether [wantonness] is so extreme that it demonstrates similar indifference is not a question that, in our view, can be further clarified; it must be left directly to the trier of facts.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Cook v. Commonwealth“Setting this conduct apart from behavior that would not warrant an unintentional murder conviction are the following characteristics: (i) homicidal risk that is exceptionally high; (ii) circumstances known to the actor that clearly show awareness of the magnitude of the risk; and (iii) minimal or non-existent social utility in the conduct. Such conduct plainly reflects more than mere awareness and conscious disregard of a substantial and unjustifiable risk of death. It manifests a high disregard for life and evinces what the common law chose to call a depravity of mind or heart.”
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.