Commonwealth v. Thomas’s Empirical Analysis
1999
Citation profile
2 district · 56 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 58 later decisions — most recently September 2018 · most notably Commonwealth v. Dwyer (2006), Commonwealth v. Braley (2007)
2 district · 56 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 Williams v. Lynaugh, Director, Texas Department of Corrections · Commonwealth v. Flebotte · Kansas v. Colorado · Commonwealth v. McLaughlin · Commonwealth v. Daye
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 58 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Where a defendant has knowledge of an available witness whose general disposition toward the defendant is friendly, or at least not hostile, and who could be expected to give testimony of distinct importance to the defendant’s case, but the defendant, without explanation, fails to call that witness, the jury may permissibly infer that that witness would have given testimony detrimental to the defendant’s case. . . . The strength of the case against the defendant, whether the defendant would be expected to call the witness if the defendant were innocent, and the importance of the witness’s likely testimony to the defense are important considerations in determining whether an adverse inference based on the defendant’s failure to call a certain witness is appropriate. . . . Where a witness’s testimony would have been merely cumulative or unimportant, there is no basis for such an inference. . . . “Whether the adverse inference is permissible depends on the facts of each case . . . and whether to give a missing witness instruction is a decision that must be made on a case-by-case basis, in the discretion of the trial judge. That decision will be overturned on appeal only if it was ‘manifestly unreasonable.’ ” (Citations omitted.)”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“this court should defer to that judge's determination of whether the prosecutor committed prejudicial error, how much any such error infected the trial, and whether it was possible to correct that error through instruction to the jury.”
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.