Commonwealth v. Tann’s Empirical Analysis
1983
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 52 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 54 later decisions — most recently December 2011 · most notably Commonwealth v. Blystone (1988), McCandless v. Vaughn (1999)
2 federal appellate · 52 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 Katz v. United States · Chimel v. California · Rakas v. Illinois · United States v. Chadwick · Rawlings v. Kentucky
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 54 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“call to the attention of the jury the fact that a witness, who is associated with the accused in the activity giving rise to the criminal charges, has waived his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination and is taking the witness stand to tell the truth. This tactic has the effect of emphasizing to the jury that the defendant, who is associated with the witness, has the same opportunity to waive his constitutional rights and tell the truth. The defendant is unduly prejudiced by this blatant invitation for the jury to draw an inference from the fact that the witness is foregoing his constitutional right against self-incrimination. This tends to spotlight the accused if he fails to do the same thing and clearly invites an improper prejudicial inference from the jury.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“`his [Hill's] testimony, to testify to what he saw on the night in question and telling the truth there [would] be no charges of any kind ... brought against him....'”
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.