Commonwealth v. Lowenberg’s Empirical Analysis
1978
Citation profile
40 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 40 later decisions — most recently September 2009 · most notably Commonwealth v. Collins (1997), Commonwealth v. Begley (2001)
40 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 Miranda v. State of Arizona Vignera · Wong Sun v. United States · Brewer v. Williams · Davis v. Mississippi · Mutual Life Ins Co of New York v. Hillmon
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 40 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Intention, viewed as a state of mind, is a fact, and the commonest way for such a fact to evince itself is through spoken or written declarations. It is therefore because of the impossibility, in many cases, of proving intention apart from personal declarations, that they are admitted. The true basis of their admission, then, is necessity, because of which an exception to the hearsay rule is recognized....”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Intention, viewed as a state of mind, is a fact, and the commonest way for such a fact to evince itself is through spoken or written declarations. It is therefore because of the impossibility, in many cases, of proving intention apart from personal declarations, that they are admitted. ... ****** In addition to the necessity for such an exception [to the hearsay rule], the admission of this type of evidence is justified because the circumstances in which these utterances were made indicate that they accurately reflected the declarant’s state of mind at the time and there was an absence of a motive to deceive. Commonwealth v. Thomas, 410 Pa. 160 , 189 A.2d 255 (1963), cert, denied, 375 U.S. 856 , 84 S.Ct. 118 , 11 L.Ed.2d 83 (1963) (should be accepted because the declarations were made in a “natural manner”). We find that this testimony was properly within the state of mind exception and that the court was correct in admitting it.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. State v. MacDonald
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.