Commonwealth v. Sheppard’s Empirical Analysis
1982
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 20 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 29 later decisions (4 by the Supreme Court) — most recently July 2007 · most notably United States v. Leon (1984), Massachusetts v. Sheppard (1984)
3 federal appellate · 20 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 Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics · Mapp v. Ohio · Franks v. Delaware · Coolidge v. New Hampshire · Rakas v. Illinois
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 29 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“informed Detective O'Malley that the warrant as delivered over was sufficient authority in form and content to carry out the search as requested,”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“The exclusionary rule may not be well tailored to deterring judicial misconduct. If applied to judicial misconduct, the rule would be just as costly as it is when it is applied to police misconduct, but it may be ill-fitted to the job-created motivations of judges. . . . [I]deally a judge is impartial as to whether a particular piece of evidence is admitted or a particular defendant convicted. Hence, in the abstract, suppression of a particular piece of evidence may not be as effective a disincentive to a neutral judge as it would be to the police. It may be that a ruling by an appellate court that a search warrant was unconstitutional would be sufficient to deter similar conduct in the future by magistrates.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“[a] fifth bottle of amaretto liquor, 2 nickel bags of marijuana, a woman's jacket that has been described as black-grey (charcoal), possessions of Sandra D. Boulware, similar type wire and rope that match those on the body of Sandra D. Boulware, or in the above [T]hunderbird. Blunt instrument that might have been used on the victim. Men's or women's clothing that may have blood, gasoline, burns on them. Items that may have fingerprints of the victim.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
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.