263 Pa. Super. 110 - Commonwealth v. Harris’s Empirical Analysis
1979
Citation profile
22 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 23 later decisions — most recently August 2007
22 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 Mullaney v. Wilbur · Commonwealth v. Bighum · Commonwealth v. Allen · Commonwealth v. Wable · Commonwealth v. Blevins
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 23 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The law is well settled in Pennsylvania that the prosecution may not introduce evidence of defendant’s prior criminal conduct as substantive evidence of his guilt of the present charge. The purpose of this rule is “to prevent the conviction of an accused for one crime by the use of evidence that he has committed other unrelated crimes, and to preclude the inference that because he has committed other crimes he was more liable to commit the crime for which he is being tried. The presumed effect of such evidence is to predispose the minds of the jurors to believe the accused guilty and thus effectively to strip him of the presumption of innocence.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage“Because the testifying police officer did not state a specific date as to when the fingerprints were taken, no reasonable inference could be drawn by the jury that the fingerprints were taken as a consequence of prior criminal activity.”
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.