451 Pa. Super. 209 - Commonwealth v. Pless’s Empirical Analysis
1996
Citation profile
20 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 20 later decisions — most recently March 2010
20 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 Commonwealth v. Dugger · Shiomos v. STATE EMP. RETIREMENT BD. · Commonwealth v. DeWitt · 415 Pa. Super. 252 - Commonwealth v. Lopez · 422 Pa. Super. 393 - Commonwealth v. Parker
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 20 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“A state trooper may stop a motor vehicle if the trooper reasonably believes that a provision of the Motor Vehicle Code is being violated. [Commonwealth v.] DeWitt, 530 Pa. [299] at 304, 608 A.2d [1030] at 1032 [ (1992) ]. Incident to this stop, the trooper may check the vehicle’s registration and the driver’s license and issue a citation. Commonwealth v. Talley, 430 Pa.Super. 351, 356 , 634 A.2d 640, 643 (1993). After producing a valid driver’s license and vehicle registration, the driver must be allowed to proceed without further delay by the police, unless the police have “reasonable grounds to suspect an illegal transaction in drugs or other serious crime.” Commonwealth v. Lopez, 415 Pa.Super. 252, 262 , 609 A.2d 177, 182 (1992), allocatur denied, 533 Pa. 598 , 617 A.2d 1273 (1992). In the instant case, Trooper Houk acted lawfully in stopping appellee for speeding and for driving with a burned out tail lamp. However, as appellee was properly issued a warning for the motor vehicle code violations, and as her driver’s license and registration passed a record check, Trooper Houk was required to have reasonable grounds to suspect an illegal transaction in drugs or other serious crime in order to further detain appellee. Lopez, supra. The mere fact that Trooper Houk thought that appellee was hiding something when she retrieved her license from her purse, and the fact he thought appellee’s side to side movements were “furtive” while she sat waiting for him to complete the warnin”
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.