Commonwealth v. Sudler’s Empirical Analysis
1981
Citation profile
95 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 95 later decisions — most recently December 2018 · most notably State v. Zuniga (1987), Commonwealth v. Holcomb (1985)
95 state decisions — followed in 11 states
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 Aguilar v. Texas · Spinelli v. United States · United States v. Crews · Commonwealth v. Kichline · United States v. Burke
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 95 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““[w]hen two independent informants both supply the same information about a particular crime to the police, each source tends inherently to bolster the reliability of the other. Although the information supplied by one questionable source may be insufficient, the probability is extremely small that a second independent source would supply identical information if it were not probably accurate.””
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Unlike in the typical informant case, where there exists the potential that the informant is acting out of self-interest, here there is no basis to conclude that Quinones was motivated by anything other than good citizenship in making his disclosure____when an average citizen tenders information to the police, the police should be permitted to assume that they are dealing with a credible person in the absence of special circumstances suggesting that such might not be the case.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“There are occasional legislative provisions penalizing sexual relations with or disrespectful treatment of corpses. The section is included here rather than in the chapter on sexual offenses because there we were concerned primarily with preventing physical aggressions, whereas here we deal with outrage to the feelings of surviving kin, outrage which can be perpetrated as well by mutilation or gross neglect as by sexual abuse. Id.”
1 later decision 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.