Commonwealth v. Rios’s Empirical Analysis
1998
Citation profile
31 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 33 later decisions — most recently October 2025 · most notably Commonwealth v. Spotz (2000), Thompson v. State (2006)
31 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 Local 408, International Brotherhood of Teamsters v. National Labor Relations Board · Copperweld Corp. v. Independence Tube Corp. · Commonwealth v. Zettlemoyer · United States v. Virginia · 116 S. Ct. 712 - Neben & Starrett, Inc. v. Chartwell Financial Corp.
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 33 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Every unwise or irrelevant remark made in the course of a trial by a judge, a witness, or counsel does not compel the granting of a new trial. Rather, the focus is on what, if any, effects the comments had on the jury. A new trial is required when the effect of the District Attorney’s comments would be to prejudice the jury, forming in their minds fixed bias and hostility toward the defendant so that they could not weigh the evidence objectively and render a true verdict.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.