Commonwealth v. Price’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

20 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 20 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “We shall assume that the defendant had an expectation of privacy in his conversations in the motel room. Society is not prepared, however, to accept any such expectation as reasonable. The defendant and his associates were engaged in negotiating a major business transaction with people whom he had just met, and whom his associates had first met the day before. Nevertheless, he brought $121,000 in cash to a motel room that was not registered in his name, but rather in the name of someone about whom he knew almost nothing. He engaged in an arm’s length business negotiation with strangers in a place over which he had neither control nor a right to control and which had been selected by strangers. [[Image here]] Any rule that would exclude objective evidence, presumably more accurate than human memory, of events happening and words spoken in the motel room should have a strong justification. A warrantless electronic surveillance in a person’s home, even with the consent of one participant in the conversations, can provide that justification, and, even there, not everyone agrees.... The circumstances of this case, however, provide no reasonable justification for excluding relevant, instructive, unbiased, and seemingly accurate evidence bearing on the guilt or innocence of the defendant.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. State v. Page