31 Mass. App. Ct. 467 - Commonwealth v. Downs’s Empirical Analysis
1991
Citation profile
12 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 12 later decisions — most recently February 2019
12 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 Miranda v. State of Arizona Vignera · Oregon v. Mathiason · Opinions of the Justices to the House of Representatives · Commonwealth v. Cronk · Opinion of the Justices to the Senate
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 12 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Particularly when reversing field on a motion to suppress, a judge ought to place in the record some words of explanation for the changed decision. That explanation need not be elaborate but should provide some clue of the judge’s mind. The absence of any findings and explanation greatly hampers review. Perhaps worse, it creates an atmosphere of arbitrary decision malting.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Red Star
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.