Commonwealth v. Smith’s Empirical Analysis
1992
Citation profile
4 federal appellate · 163 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 191 later decisions — most recently October 2025 · most notably Com., Dept. of Transp. v. McCafferty (2000), Commonwealth v. Hawkins (1997)
4 federal appellate · 163 state decisions — followed in 21 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 Brady v. State of Maryland · Oregon v. Kennedy · United States v. Dinitz · Commonwealth v. Smith · Commonwealth v. Starks
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 191 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“We now hold that the double jeopardy clause of the Pennsylvania Constitution prohibits retrial of a defendant not only when prosecutorial misconduct is intended to provoke the defendant into moving for a mistrial, but also when the conduct of the prosecutor is intentionally undertaken to prejudice the defendant to the point of the denial of a fair trial.”
19 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“[t]he United States Supreme Court has enunciated principally two types of pros-ecutorial overreaching. First there is the prosecutorial misconduct which is designed to provoke a mistrial in order to secure a second, perhaps more favorable, opportunity to convict the defendant. Second there is the prosecutorial misconduct undertaken in bad faith to prejudice or harass the defendant. In contrast to prosecutorial error, overreaching is not an inevitable part of the trial process and cannot be condoned. It signals the breakdown of the integrity of the judicial proceeding, and represents the type of prosecutorial tactic which the double jeopardy clause was designed to protect against.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“[d]eliberate failure to disclose material exculpatory physical evidence during a capital trial, intentional suppression of the evidence while arguing in favor of the death sentence on direct appeal, and investigation of [a police officer’s] role in the production of the evidence rather than its own role in the suppression of evidence constitute prosecutorial misconduct such as violates all principles of justice and fairness embodied in the Pennsylvania Constitution’s double jeopardy clause.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
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.