Commonwealth v. Cheek’s Empirical Analysis
1992
Citation profile
78 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 78 later decisions — most recently October 2022 · most notably Commonwealth v. Scott (2004), Commonwealth v. Grandison (2001)
78 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 Terry v. Ohio · Commonwealth v. Antobenedetto · Commonwealth v. Fraser · Commonwealth v. Moses · Commonwealth v. Lyons
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 78 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“did not help to single him out from any other [B]lack male in the area”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“[T]he description of the suspect as a 'black male with a black ¾ length goose' could have fit a large number of men who reside in the Grove Hall section of Roxbury, a predominantly black neighborhood of the city. The officers possessed no additional physical description of the suspect that would have distinguished the defendant from any other black male in the area such as the suspect's height and weight, whether he had facial hair, unique markings on his face or clothes, or other identifying characteristics. That the jacket matched was not enough to single him out. Moreover, the Commonwealth presented no evidence to establish that a '¾ length goose' jacket, the sole distinctive physical characteristic of the garment, was somehow unusual or, at least, uncommon as an outer garment worn on a cold fall night.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“jacket not sufficiently particularized to support reasonable suspicion where defendant was one-half mile from the scene of the reported stabbing). Moreover, to the extent the defendant's”
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.