Commonwealth v. Roots’s Empirical Analysis
1978
Citation profile
146 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 148 later decisions — most recently December 2014 · most notably Commonwealth v. Davis (1980), Commonwealth v. Randall (1987)
146 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 Griffin v. California · Lascaris v. Shirley · Gordon v. United States · Commonwealth v. Bighum · Burnet v. Coronado Oil & Gas Co.
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 148 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“1) the degree to which the commission of the prior offense reflects upon the veracity of the defendant-witness; 2) the likelihood, in view of the nature and extent of the prior record, that it would have a greater tendency to smear the character of the defendant and suggest a propensity to commit the crime for which he stands charged, rather than provide a legitimate reason for discrediting him as an untruthful person; 3) the age and circumstances of the defendant; 4) the strength of the prosecution's case and the prosecution's need to resort to this evidence as compared with the availability to the defense of other witnesses through which its version of the events surrounding the incident can be presented; and 5) the existence of alternative means of attacking the defendant's credibility.”
26 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“"the age and nature of the prior crimes; the length of the criminal record; the age and circumstances of the defendant; the extent to which it is more important to the search for truth in a particular case for the jury to hear the defendant's story than to know of a prior conviction." Commonwealth v. Bighum, supra, 452 Pa. at 567 , 307 A.2d at 263 .”
6 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“"[w]hen we consider the difficulty in limiting this type of evidence to the purpose for which it was introduced, the natural tendency for it to be interpreted as indicative of the defendant's propensity to commit crime, and the ineffectiveness of cautionary instructions, it is apparent that the prosecution should be required to show that the state's interest in its probative value outweighs the prejudice that will inure to the defendant."”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.