Commonwealth v. Pleas’s Empirical Analysis
2000
Citation profile
24 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 26 later decisions — most recently June 2025 · most notably Fontaine v. People (2012), Commonwealth v. Vacher (2014)
24 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 ITT Gilfillan v. Clayton · Copperweld Corp. v. Independence Tube Corp. · Adair v. United States · United States v. Sun-Diamond Growers of California · Commonwealth v. Sturtivant
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 26 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“if there is some basis for concluding that the witness is more likely to correctly identify the defendant from the photograph than is the jury. Put another way, 'such testimony is admissible ... when the witness possesses sufficiently relevant familiarity with the defendant that the jury cannot also possess.'”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“[the images] are neither 'so unmistakably clear or so hopelessly obscure that the witness is no better-suited than the jury to make the identification'”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“the subject matter to which the testimony relates cannot be reproduced or described to the jury precisely as it appeared to the witness at the time”
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.