Commonwealth v. Mercado’s Empirical Analysis
1996
Citation profile
123 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 123 later decisions — most recently February 2022 · most notably Commonwealth v. Scott (2004), Commonwealth v. Wilson (2004)
123 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 · Adams v. Williams · Liotta v. National Forge Co. · Vereen v. United States · Commonwealth v. Silva
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 123 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“make an independent determination of the correctness of the judge's application of constitutional principles to the facts”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“[T]he information in [the police officer's] possession allowed him to distinguish [the defendant] and his companion from other persons in the vicinity. The radio report narrowed the range of possible suspects to males of Hispanic descent who were in the vicinity south of 146 Main Street. [The witness's] statement further narrowed the range of suspects to males of Hispanic descent then present in the Kangaroo Crossing store. That information, coupled with the behavior of [the defendant] and his companion on seeing a police officer as they left the store, was sufficient for [the police officer] to form a reasonable suspicion of those two particular men”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“Neither evasive behavior, proximity to a crime scene, nor matching a general description is alone sufficient to support the reasonable suspicion necessary to justify a stop and frisk. . . . Each of these factors may, however, be considered by the police, and in combination may allow the police to narrow the range of suspects to particular individuals.”
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.