Commonwealth v. Sands’s Empirical Analysis
1997
Citation profile
2 district · 68 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 70 later decisions — most recently February 2021 · most notably Hulse v. State, Department of Justice (1998), Canavan's Case (2000)
2 district · 68 state decisions — followed in 10 states
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 Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. · Frye v. United States · McKennon v. Nashville Banner Publishing Co. · 8 Cal. 4th 587 - People v. Leahy · Commonwealth v. Lanigan
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 70 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Nystagmus is 'an abnormal and involuntary movement of the eyeballs from side to side or up and down, but usually from side to side.' " Commonwealth v. Sands , 424 Mass. 184 , 186 (1997), quoting from State v. Merritt , 36 Conn. App. 76 , 84 (1994). "The underlying theory is that there is a strong correlation between the degree of a person's intoxication and the angle at which the person's eyes begin to exhibit evidence of nystagmus.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“[a] lay juror understands that intoxication leads to diminished”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“the touchstone of admissibility is reliability”
2 later decisions 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.