2005 Pa. Super. 15 - Commonwealth v. Bryant’s Empirical Analysis
2005
Citation profile
14 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 14 later decisions — most recently December 2024
14 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 Terry v. Ohio · Commonwealth v. DeWitt · Commonwealth v. Zhahir · 355 Pa. Super. 514 - Commonwealth v. Reddix · 2000 Pa. Super. 305 - Commonwealth v. Phinn
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 14 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The first [level of interaction] is a “mere encounter” (or request for information) which need not be supported by any level of suspicion, but carries no official compulsion to stop or to respond. The second, an “investigative detention” must be supported by a reasonable suspicion; it subjects a suspect to a stop and a period of detention, but does not involve such coercive conditions as to constitute the functional equivalent of an arrest. Finally an arrest or “custodial detention” must be supported by probable cause.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage“[An appellate court’s] inquiry is a dual one — whether the offieer[’s] action was justified at its inception, and whether it was reasonably related in scope to the circumstances which justified the interference in the first place. Regarding the stop, a police officer may, short of an arrest, conduct an investigative detention if he has a reasonable suspicion, based upon specific and articulable facts, that criminality is afoot. The fundamental inquiry is an objective one, namely, whether the facts available to the officer at the moment of the [intrusion] warrant a man of reasonable caution in the belief that the action taken was appropriate. This assessment, like that applicable to the determination of probable cause, requires an evaluation of the totality of the circumstances, with a lesser showing needed to demonstrate reasonable suspicion in terms of both quantity or content and reliability.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“We have held consistently that the Fourth Amendment does not require a policeman who lacks the precise level of information necessary for probable cause to arrest to simply shrug his shoulders and allow a crime to occur or a criminal to escape. On the contrary, Terry [v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 , 88 S.Ct. 1868 , 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968),] and its progeny recognize that the essence of good police work is for the police to adopt an intermediate response where they observe a suspect engaging in unusual and suspicious behavior. A brief stop of a suspicious individual, in order to determine his identity or to maintain the status quo momentarily while obtaining more information, may be reasonable in light of facts known to the officer at the time.”
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.