Robinson v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1971
Citation profile
39 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 40 later decisions — most recently March 2018 · most notably Jones v. Commonwealth (1984), Whaley v. Commonwealth (1973)
39 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.
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 40 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The basic rule for admitting demonstrative evidence is that the burden is upon the party offering the evidence to show with reasonable certainty that there has been no alteration or substitution of it. But the burden is not absolute that "all possibility of tampering" be eliminated.... However, "[t]he requirement of reasonable certainty is not met when some vital link in the chain of possession is not accounted for, because then it is as likely as not that the evidence analyzed was not the evidence originally received."”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
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.