Commonwealth v. Morganti’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

25 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 25 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “When a suspect’s statement, as here, simply reflects his musing about the possibility of stopping the questioning until he has spoken with an attorney, we have consistently found the statement to be too ambiguous to constitute an unequivocal invocation of the right to counsel. See, e.g., Commonwealth v. Dubois, 451 Mass. 20, 25 (2008) (“This sounds serious. Maybe I better get a lawyer”); Commonwealth v. Jones, 439 Mass. 249, 258 (2003) (defendant stated that he was “going to need a lawyer sometime”); Commonwealth v. Peixoto, 430 Mass. 654, 657-58 (2000) (defendant expressed uncertainty as to whether he wanted to speak to police without attorney); Commonwealth v. Todd, 408 Mass. 724, 726 (1990) (defendant “wondered aloud about the advisability of having a lawyer”); Commonwealth v. Corriveau, 396 Mass. 319, 331 (1985) (“It’s beginning to sound like I need a lawyer”). See also Commonwealth v. Hussey (No. 1), 410 Mass. 664, 671 , cert. denied, 502 U.S. 988 (1991) (defendant’s statement that “he had nothing else he could say,” coupled with his “thinking out loud” about whether he should talk or “shut . . . up,” did not amount to invocation of right to cut off questioning).”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 27 Mass. L. Rptr. 308 - Commonwealth v. Rodriguez