Commonwealth v. Delgado’s Empirical Analysis
1996
Citation profile
31 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 31 later decisions — most recently December 2025 · most notably 241 Ill. 2d 139 - People v. Comage (2011), 314 N.J. Super. 440 - State v. Sharpless (1998)
31 state decisions — followed in 10 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 435 Pa. Super. 603 - Guadagnino v. Montie · R.A.R. v. T.M.
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 31 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[Defendant's] act of discarding contraband in plain view of the police does not rise to a level of conduct that constitutes the destruction or concealment of evidence as contemplated by the statute. The act of throwing the bag of cocaine while being chased by the police was nothing more than an abandonment of the evidence.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage“A person commits a misdemeanor of the second degree if, believing that an official proceeding or investigation is pending or about to be instituted, he: (1) alters, destroys, conceals or removes any record, document or thing with intent to impair its verity or availability in such proceeding or investigation[.]”
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.