Watkins v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1980
Citation profile
56 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 58 later decisions — most recently August 2009 · most notably Longshore v. State (2007), Little v. State (1984)
56 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 Terry v. Ohio · Wong Sun v. United States · Mapp v. Ohio · Aguilar v. Texas · Spinelli 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 58 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““ ‘[W]here a crime may have been committed and a suspect or important witness is about to disappear, it seems irrational to deprive the officer of the opportunity to ‘freeze’ the situation for a short time, so that he may make inquiry and arrive at a considered judgment about further action to be taken. To deny the police such a power would be to pay a high price in effective policing and in the police’s respect for the good sense of the rules that govern them.’ ””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“corroborated by other suspicious circumstances. . . .”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“The central inquiry is “the reasonableness in all the circumstances of the particular governmental invasion of a citizen’s personal security.” In determining whether the intrusion was justified at its inception, “the police officer must be able to point to specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant that intrusion.” The reasonableness of an intrusion is to be assessed against an objective standard' — whether “the facts available to the officer at the moment of the seizure or the search ‘warrant a man of reasonable caution in the belief that the action taken was appropriate.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.