Commonwealth v. Fullerton’s Empirical Analysis
1977
Citation profile
14 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 14 later decisions — most recently March 1990
14 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 Commonwealth v. Miles · 4 Pa. Commw. 119 - Department of Transportation v. Cannon · 9 Pa. Commw. 460 - Bureau of Traffic Safety v. Drugotch · 16 Pa. Commw. 9 - Campbell v. Commonwealth, Department of Transportation
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 14 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“To err is human and we hold that Fullerton could not avail himself of this mistake and unreasonably withhold his assent to blow into the machine on the second occasion without his action being construed as refusing to take the test. Certainly no prejudice or harm would have befallen Fullerton had he blown into the machine on the second occasion. . . . In reality Fullerton never did take the first test because the machine could not have functioned. There never was a test result in this case. This is not an instance where the test result was negative or below a certain reading for alcoholic content and the person is requested to take the test again to see if the reading is different on the second test. Nor is it the type of situation where we could conclude that the [driver's] constitutional rights were trammeled by the police officers due to the officers' unjustified and unwarranted actions. When the defect was immediately discovered and explained to Fullerton, he was under a legal obligation to comply with the request to take the test on the readjusted breathalyzer machine or face the consequences of failing to assent.”
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.