Commonwealth v. Smith’s Empirical Analysis
1997
Citation profile
17 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 20 later decisions — most recently March 2019
17 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 Oregon v. Mathiason · Anthony v. United States · Commonwealth v. Tavares · Commonwealth v. Mello · Commonwealth v. Judge
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 20 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[A]fter the defendant told the police that he was there to confess to the murder of his girl friend, given the information the police already had received about the murder, we conclude that if he had wanted to leave at that point, he would not have been free to do so.”
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.