Commonwealth v. Benson’s Empirical Analysis
1976
Citation profile
21 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 21 later decisions — most recently July 1998
21 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 Spinelli v. United States · Adams v. Williams · Whiteley v. Warden, Wyoming State Penitentiary · Saxbe v. Washington Post Co. · Commonwealth v. Swanger
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 21 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“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 [supra] recognizes that it may be the essence of good police work to adopt on intermediate response____ 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 most reasonable in light of the facts known to the officer at the time____”
1 later decision quote this exact passage““[Ojfficers without reasonable suspicion to stop a suspect can issue a radio call and have other officers stop the suspect. The stopping officers would then be able to obtain sufficient information to justify the stop. This has never been the law.””
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.