431 Pa. Super. 1 - Commonwealth v. Oliver’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

8 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 8 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “Until the late 1960’s, courts routinely allowed the admission of non-testifying co-defendants’ statements, and held that all prejudice could be cured by a simple limiting instruction that the jury only consider each confession against its author, and not the other co-defendants who were implicated by name. The U.S. Supreme Court declared this practice unconstitutional in Bruton v. United States. The response has been to employ another fiction: redaction of co-defendants’ statements so as to eliminate all references to an accused by name. This practice of substituting pronouns or “other person” for specific names has been approved by our courts. See Commonwealth v. Johnson, 474 Pa. 410 , 378 A.2d 859 (1977). Redacting testimony is not a magic curative elixir, but still requires a court to balance the potential prejudice to the defendant against the probative value of the evidence, the possibility of minimizing prejudice, and the benefits to the criminal justice system of conducting joint trials. Redacted testimony may still violate the Bruton rule if it is “powerfully incriminating” and lends “‘substantial, perhaps critical weight’ to the prosecution’s case.” Commonwealth v. Rawls, 276 Pa.Super. 89, 97 , 419 A.2d 109, 113 (1980).”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 442 Pa. Super. 579 - Commonwealth v. Brooks