Commonwealth v. Rostad’s Empirical Analysis
1991
Citation profile
2 district · 16 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 18 later decisions — most recently March 2019
2 district · 16 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 South Dakota v. Opperman · Colorado v. Bertine · Illinois v. Lafayette · Commonwealth v. Garcia · Commonwealth v. Bishop
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 18 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““explicit enough to guard against the possibility that police officers would exercise discretion with respect to whether to open closed wallets and handbags as part of their inventory search. It may be true, as the judge observed, that ‘[ajuthority to search such containers is . . . implicit in an injunction to search the person of an arrestee and inventory all items collected,’ but we think that an injunction in such general terms is not entirely clear and therefore unacceptably invites the exercise of police officer discretion.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“made it clear that, if police open a closed container during an inventory search in the absence of a specific written procedure requiring them to do so, then any evidence they discover in the container must be suppressed.”
1 later decision 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.