277 Pa. Super. 244 - Commonwealth v. Borecky’s Empirical Analysis
1980
Citation profile
30 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 30 later decisions — most recently March 2000 · most notably 311 Pa. Super. 264 - Commonwealth v. Lapia (1983), 346 Pa. Super. 77 - Commonwealth v. Cieri (1985)
30 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 Wong Sun v. United States · Aguilar v. Texas · Coolidge v. New Hampshire · Spinelli v. United States · Sedillo v. United States
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 30 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“It is firmly established that the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against search and seizures applies only to the actions of governmental authorities and is inapplicable to the conduct of private parties. [I]t is ... well-settled that the evidence gathered through a search by a private individual must come to the state upon a “silver platter” and not as the result of any instigation by state authorities or participation by them in the illegal activities. The critical factor, as the United States Supreme Court has stated, “is whether [the private individual] in light of all of the circumstances of the ease, must be regarded as having acted as an ‘instrument’ or agent of the state....””
1 later decision quote this exact passage“[T]he state trooper’s admitted prior knowledge of the warrantless search, and acquiescence therein, was sufficient to constitute ratification of the informant’s illegal activity on behalf of the Commonwealth. Accordingly, the informant’s search must be deemed a governmental search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment and its attendant exclusionary rules. Therefore, since the sample contraband unlawfully seized by the informant obviously supplied the foundation upon which the subsequent search warrant was obtained, all of the evidence seized pursuant to the warrant must be suppressed as the “fruit of the poisonous tree.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage“[t]he decisive factor ... is actuality of a share by a [governmental] official in the total enterprise of securing and selecting evidence by other than sanctioned means. It is immaterial whether a federal agent originated the idea or joined it while it was in progress. So long as he was in it before the object of the search was completely accomplished, he must be deemed to have participated in it.”
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.