21 Mass. App. Ct. 183 - Commonwealth v. Thomas’s Empirical Analysis
1985
Citation profile
14 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 14 later decisions — most recently February 2019
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 Beck v. Alabama · Bollenbach v. United States · Padilla-Martinez v. United States · Infelice v. United States · Goldman v. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc.
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 alertness of the jury in this situation was impressive, and, unless for some particular reason it would be unfair to do so, the judge was obligated to respond with an accurate statement of the law.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“When a jury makes explicit its difficulties, a trial judge should clear them away with concrete accuracy.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“the defense [is] undermined ... because 'the critical role of good argument was vitiated.'”
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.