Commonwealth v. Baity’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

3 federal appellate · 70 state decisions

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 75 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““. . . are we to be governed by 1949 law or 1967 law in passing upon the voluntariness of Baity’s confession? We start, of course, with the proposition now firmly established both by this Court, and the Supreme Court of the United States, that an involuntary confession, unlike a confession procured in the absence of Miranda or Escobedo warnings, could have such an impact on the reliability of the fact finding process, due to the substantial possibility that it represents an untruth, that we give retroactive application to all the current United States Supreme Court cases dealing with involuntary confessions. See, e.g., Davis v. North Carolina, 384 U. S. 737 , 86 S. Ct. 1761 (1966); cf. Commonwealth v. Padgett, 428 Pa. 229 , 237 A. 2d 209 , (1967). See also, Mishkin, ‘Forward: The High Court, The Great Writ, and the Due Process of Time and Law’, 79 Harvard Law Review 56, 79-86 (1965). Thus, were we faced with an involuntariness claim stemming from a 1949 jury trial in which the confession were used as evidence, there would be no doubt that 1967 law would dictate the parameters within which the confession must now be tested”.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Commonwealth v. Willman