Commonwealth v. Ransome’s Empirical Analysis
1979
Citation profile
88 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 90 later decisions — most recently March 2026 · most notably Commonwealth v. Buehl (1986), Commonwealth v. Chester (1991)
88 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 United States v. Wade · Neil v. Biggers · Manson v. Brathwaite · Commonwealth v. Hubbard · Commonwealth v. Rose
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 90 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“the opportunity of the witness to view the criminal at the time of the crime, the witness’ degree of attention, the accuracy of his prior description of the criminal, the level of certainty demonstrated at the confrontation, and the time between the crime and the confrontation. Against these factors is to be weighed the corrupting effect of the suggestive identification itself.”
9 later decisions quote this exact passage“[W]hen viewed with the totality of the circumstances, Parsons’ identification of appellant as one of the attackers was independent of the preliminary hearing identification and was purged of any taint attendant to the preliminary hearing identification.”
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.