444 Pa. Super. 60 - Commonwealth v. Knotts’s Empirical Analysis
1995
Citation profile
28 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 28 later decisions — most recently August 2010 · most notably Commonwealth v. Lohr (1998), 451 Pa. Super. 129 - Commonwealth v. Jackson (1996)
28 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 Alabama v. White · Commonwealth v. DeWitt · Commonwealth v. Blouse · 388 Pa. Super. 82 - Commonwealth v. Bruner · 428 Pa. Super. 259 - Commonwealth v. Donahue
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 28 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““When [a] police [officer] stop[s] a vehicle in this Commonwealth for investigatory purposes, the vehicle, and its occupants, are considered ‘seized’ and this seizure is subject to constitutional constraints.” Commomvealth v. Knotts, 444 Pa.Super. 60 , 663 A.2d 216, 218 (1995) (citation omitted).”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“It is well established that when the police stop a vehicle in this Commonwealth for [investigative] purposes, the vehicle, and its occupants are considered ‘seized’ and this seizure is subject to constitutional restraints. An [investigative] stop of an automobile is justified only when it is based upon objective facts creating a reasonable suspicion the vehicle’s occupants are presently involved in criminal activity. To meet this standard, the officer must point to specific articulable facts which, together with the rational inferences therefrom, reasonably warrant the intrusion. To have reasonable suspicion, police officers need not personally observe the suspicious or illegal conduct, but may rely on the information of third parties, including “tips” from citizens. Naturally, if a tip has a relatively low degree of reliability, more information will be required to establish the requisite quantum of suspicion than would be required if the tip were more reliable. When the underlying source of the officer’s information is an anonymous call, the tip should be treated with particular suspicion. However a tip from a known informer known to the police may carry enough indicia of reliability for the police to conduct an investigative stop, even though the same tip from an anonymous informant would likely not have done so.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“In an appeal from the denial of a motion to suppress our role is to determine whether the record supports the suppression court’s factual findings and the legitimacy of the inferences and legal conclusions drawn from those findings. In making this determination, we may consider only the evidence of the prosecution’s witnesses and so much of the defense as, fairly read in the context of the record as a whole, remains uncontradicted. When the factual findings of the suppression court are supported by the evidence, we may reverse only if there is an error in the legal conclusions drawn from those factual findings.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Commonwealth v. Lohr
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.