Commonwealth v. Ionata’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

17 state decisions

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 17 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “[b]y neglecting to obtain a warrant covering the vehicle, and by approaching appellee immediately upon his arrival, the officers inexplicably took the risk that appellee would at least temporarily have kept the drugs in the automobile, and, thus, they took the risk that appellee would not yet have moved any of the contraband into areas covered by the search warrant. In short, this case does not involve a search conducted under exigent circumstances; rather, it involves a search undertaken after the police had, through oversight or lack of planning, failed to obtain a warrant to search a vehicle that they knew hours in advance would be parked at appellee’s apartment after it had been used to transport contraband. Indeed, it would be difficult to conceive of a case where the circumstances surrounding a challenged search would be more clearly non-exigent than those presented here. Thus, inasmuch as obtaining a warrant would certainly have been practicable, suppression of the items seized in the instant search was entirely proper.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Commonwealth v. Labron