Commonwealth v. Jeffries’s Empirical Analysis
1973
Citation profile
5 federal appellate · 167 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 172 later decisions — most recently November 2021 · most notably Commonwealth v. Harper (1979), Commonwealth v. DeWitt (1992)
5 federal appellate · 167 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 · Wong Sun v. United States · Katz v. United States · Beck v. State of Ohio · Adams v. Williams
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 172 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“"`Although abandoned property may normally be obtained and used for evidentiary purposes by the police, such property may not be utilized where the abandonment is coerced by unlawful police action.'"”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage““On the afternoon of November 6, 1970, four police officers in an unmarked police automobile observed Jeffries walking along a public street in Pittsburgh. One officer testified when Jeffries saw the officers, he ‘quickened his pace’. Upon seeing him do so, the officer left the police vehicle and started to pursue Jeffries, who then began to run. While giving chase, the officer observed Jeffries throw a cigarette package under an automobile parked along the street. Shortly thereafter, the officer overtook Jeffries and directed him to stand against a wall. At that moment the other officers arrived on the scene and they were told by the officer, who apprehended Jeffries, to ‘hold him one minute’. The officer then recovered the cigarette package from underneath the parked vehicle, and it was found to contain several foil-wrapped packages of a substance later determined to be heroin.” Id., 454 Pa. at 322 , 311 A.2d at 916 .”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“absent some other factor which would give rise to suspicion of criminal conduct”
3 later decisions 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.