Commonwealth v. Watson’s Empirical Analysis
2000
Citation profile
2 district · 69 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 71 later decisions — most recently February 2022 · most notably Commonwealth v. Grandison (2001), Commonwealth v. Isaiah I. (2008)
2 district · 69 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 · United States v. Mendenhall · United States v. Sokolow · United States v. Place · Michigan v. Chesternut
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 71 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“'Seemingly innocent activities taken together can give rise to reasonable suspicion [of drug activity] justifying a threshold inquiry.' Commonwealth v. Watson , 430 Mass. 725 , 729 [ 723 N.E.2d 501 ] (2000).”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“'[P]ursuit begins when action by police would communicate[ ] to the reasonable person an attempt to capture or otherwise intrude on [an individual's] freedom of movement.'”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Gunter v. Cicero“make a threshold inquiry where suspicious conduct gives the officer reason to suspect that a person has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a crime.”
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.