Commonwealth v. Zagranski’s Empirical Analysis
1990
Citation profile
69 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 69 later decisions — most recently November 2018 · most notably Commonwealth v. Wilson (1998), Commonwealth v. Vinnie (1998)
69 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 Bates v. State Bar · Young v. United States ex rel. Vuitton · Commonwealth v. Upton · Commonwealth v. Domanski · Commonwealth v. Helfant
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 69 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““[t]he declarant had just been told in the kitchen of her home that her husband was under arrest for murder. There is a strong basis for concluding that her sudden reaction was reliable and not contrived. At this time, the police had not discovered the victim’s body in the storage area. A reasonable inference from her remarks is that the defendant had admitted to his wife that he had killed the victim and had hidden the body. . . . The underlying event was . . . the declarant’s discovery of her handcuffed husband under arrest for murder in the kitchen of her home. The excitement of that underlying event produced her spontaneous exclamations. The remarks of the defendant’s wife tended to characterize and explain her perception of the arrest. In her view, the arrest was unwarranted because she believed the police had not discovered the victim’s body.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
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.