371 Pa. Super. 188 - Commonwealth v. McEachin’s Empirical Analysis
1988
Citation profile
27 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 27 later decisions — most recently December 2018 · most notably 378 Pa. Super. 353 - Commonwealth v. Groff (1988), 382 Pa. Super. 116 - Commonwealth v. Pankraz (1989)
27 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 Strickland v. Washington · Bruton v. United States · Commonwealth v. Peterson · Rosche v. McCoy · Commonwealth v. Gee
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 27 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“A witness is presumed competent to testify unless proven otherwise. When a proposed witness is under fourteen years of age, however, there must be a searching judicial inquiry as to mental capacity. This inquiry will probe the capacity to communicate, observe and remember, and a consciousness of the duty to speak the truth in proportion to the witness’s chronological immaturity. [T]he judge holds the superior opportunity to evaluate the competency of a proposed child witness____”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage““(1) such capacity to communicate, including as it does both an ability to understand questions and to frame express and intelligent answers; (2) mental capacity to observe the occurrence itself and the capacity of remembering what it is that [the witness] is called to testify about; and (3) a consciousness of the duty to speak the truth.””
2 later decisions 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.