Commonwealth v. Williams’s Empirical Analysis
1984
Citation profile
84 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 84 later decisions — most recently September 2025 · most notably Commonwealth v. D'Amato (1987), State v. Benoit (1985)
84 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 Miranda v. State of Arizona Vignera · Red Ball Motor Freight, Inc. v. Shannon · Commonwealth v. Bosurgi · Commonwealth v. McCutchen · Commonwealth v. Roane
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 84 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The requirements of due process are satisfied, and the protection against the use of involuntary confessions which law and reason demand is met by application of the totality of circumstances analysis to all questions involving the waiver of rights and the voluntariness of confessions made by juveniles. All of the attending facts and circumstances must be considered and weighed in determining whether a juvenile’s confession was knowingly and freely given. Among those factors are the juvenile’s youth, experience, comprehension, and the presence or absence of an interested adult.”
11 later decisions quote this exact passage“[ U]pon re-examination of the per se rule promulgated by McCutchen , we believe that protection of juveniles against the innate disadvantages associated with the im maturity of most youth may well be achieved in a manner that affords more adequate weight to the interests of society, and of justice, while avoiding per se applications of the interested and informed adult rule that serve, in an overly protective and unreasonably paternalistic fashion, to provide means for juvenile offenders to secure suppression of confessions in fact given in a knowing, intelligent and voluntary manner.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“We now reject the application of a rebuttable presumption that a juvenile is incompetent to waive his constitutional rights without first having an opportunity to consult with an interested or informed adult. The presumption adopted in Christmas serves no useful analytical purpose. The so-called presumption is not a presumption at all since it merely verifies the Commonwealth’s established burden of proving a knowing, intelligent and voluntary waiver on the part of a juvenile.”
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.