413 Pa. Super. 554 - Commonwealth v. Crowley’s Empirical Analysis
1992
Citation profile
12 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 12 later decisions — most recently December 2025
12 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 Ohio Bureau of Employment Services v. Hodory · Turner v. United States · McGinnis v. Royster · Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Sullivan v. Ashe · 63 Ill. 2d 1 - People v. Mayberry
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 12 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“... appellant’s argument proves both too much and too little. Too much, in the sense that, by accepting appellant’s own premise that narcotics such as heroin and cocaine are generally marketed in mixtures or compounds, it does not seem unreasonable or irrational for a legislature to deal realistically with the marketing of the mixture or compound rather than the handling of the pure narcotic. Too little, in the sense that while it may not be wise to let the possessor of the pure or a purer product escape with a lighter penalty than that going to the possessor of the drug in its ordinary marketable form, it is not necessary for a legislature to attempt to eradicate all evil, but only part of it; as the Court said in Pennsylvania v. Ashe, 302 U.S. 51, 55 , 58 S.Ct. 59, 60 , 82 L.Ed. 43 (1937), “ The comparative gravity of criminal offenses and whether their consequences are more or less injurious are matters for [the state’s] determination.” No doubt the [Pennsylvania] legislature, when it adopted the statutory scheme here in question ... had in mind a more flexible pattern of handling drug offenses ... considering that possessors of greater quantities of drugs should be punished more seriously because they are more likely to be dealers or to be capable of becoming such than possessors of smaller quantities, or because the greater quantities present a greater threat to society. Certainly to this extent the legislation cannot be treated as irrational. Taking the additional knowl”
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.