Smith v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

8 state decisions

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 9 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “(1) the purpose of the questioning; (2) whether the place of the questioning was hostile or coercive; (3) the length of the questioning; and (4) other indicia of custody such as whether the suspect was informed at the time that the questioning was voluntary or that the suspect was free to leave or to request the officers to do so; whether the suspect possessed unrestrained freedom of movement during questioning; and whether the suspect initiated contact with the police or voluntarily admitted the officers to the residence and acquiesced to their requests to answer some questions.”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. E.C. v. Commonwealth · Turley v. Commonwealth

2. “Quarles involved an identifiable and specific danger requiring immediate and unfettered questioning of the defendant to alleviate the risk. As explained in Quarles : The police in this case, in the very act of apprehending a suspect, were confronted with the immediate necessity of ascertaining the whereabouts of a gun which they had every reason to believe the suspect had just removed from his empty holster and discarded in the supermarket. So long as the gun was concealed somewhere in the supermarket, with its actual whereabouts unknown, it obviously posed more than one danger to the public safety: an accomplice might make use of it, a customer or employee might later come upon it. In such a situation, if the police are required to recite the familiar Miranda warnings before asking the whereabouts of the gun, suspects in Quarles’ position might well be deterred from responding. Procedural safeguards which deter a suspect from responding were deemed acceptable in Miranda in order to protect the Fifth Amendment privilege; when the primary social cost of those added protections is the possibility of fewer convictions, the Miranda majority was willing to bear that cost. Here, had Miranda warnings deterred Quarles from responding to Officer Kraft’s question about the whereabouts of the gun, the cost would have been something more than merely the failure to obtain evidence useful in convicting Quarles. Officer Kraft needed an answer to his question not simply to make his case agai”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Dike v. Commonwealth

3. “Quarles , the United States Supreme Court recognized an exception to the Miranda warning requirement which would allow the admission of a statement made in response to a custodial interrogation if the questioning was designed to elicit an answer to protect the public. In Quarles , police were pursuing a rape suspect who abandoned a gun in a grocery store. Upon apprehending the suspect, a police officer asked him where the gun was without Mirandizing him, and the suspect stated where the gun was located. The Court held that the statement regarding the gun’s location was admissible stating, “We do not believe that the doctrinal underpinnings of Miranda require that it be applied in all its rigor to a situation in which police officers ask questions reasonably prompted by concern for the public safety.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Dike v. Commonwealth