455 Pa. Super. 45 - Commonwealth v. Wallace’s Empirical Analysis
1996
Citation profile
5 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 5 later decisions — most recently July 2014
5 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 Jackson v. Virginia · Tibbs v. Florida · Green v. United States · United States v. Scott · United States v. Dinitz
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 5 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“... [Where] the Commonwealth fails to produce a. police officer as a witness at the time set for a de novo hearing, the appropriate action for the court to take is to dismiss the charges. Reprosecution on charges which have been dismissed due to the failure of prosecution witnesses to appear is not barred by double jeopardy considerations. This is so because in such instances there has been no factual determination of guilt or innocence made by the court. In contrast, where a determination of guilt or innocence is made by the court, it is deciding the strength or relative weakness of the evidence presented. In this case no evidence was heard by the court. Thus, although mislabeled a not-guilty determination, the court, in fact, sought to dismiss the charges for failure of the Commonwealth to produce a witness. ... As the record shows, the Commonwealth was unable to produce a critical witness, thus it sought a continuance .... The court’s ... decision based upon the fact that the Commonwealth did not produce a witness, certainly cannot be said to be a ruling on the merits which should implicate double jeopardy concerns. [[Image here]] It would be wrong for this [C]ourt not to look beyond the words “not-guilty” and see that, in this case, such a ruling was erroneously entered. It would be unjust to not examine the circumstances which caused the ruling to be entered and to evaluate the matter for what it is, instead of what it appears to be. The decision by the trial court in th”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“The Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution protects an individual against successive punishments and successive prosecutions for the same criminal offense. [A]t the heart of double jeopardy jurisprudence is the requirement that an individual demonstrate ... he ... has been subjected to the risk of a trial on the merits. In Pennsylvania, jeopardy does not attach and the constitutional prohibition against double jeopardy has no application until a defendant stands before a tribunal where guilt or innocence will be determined.... In a bench trial, ... jeopardy attaches when the trial court begins to hear the evidence.”
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.