Commonwealth v. Thomas’s Empirical Analysis
1999
Citation profile
10 district · 47 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 57 later decisions — most recently March 2019 · most notably Commonwealth v. Jimenez (2002), Commonwealth v. Isaiah I. (2007)
10 district · 47 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 · Bell v. Wolfish · Florida v. Royer · United States v. Mendenhall · United States v. Robinson
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 57 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“A search of a defendant 'lawfully could progressively extend into a strip [or a visual body cavity] search only if such a search was justified by probable cause to believe that the defendant had concealed [drugs] on his person or his clothing that would not otherwise be discovered by the usual search incident to arrest'”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“A strip search generally refers to an inspection of a naked individual, without any scrutiny of his body cavities. A visual body cavity search extends to a visual inspection of the anal and genital areas.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“strip or visual body cavity searches, by their very nature, are humiliating, demeaning, and terrifying experiences that, without question, constitute a substantial intrusion on one's personal privacy rights protected under the Fourth Amendment [to the United States Constitution] and art. 14 [of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights],”
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.