Commonwealth v. Cox’s Empirical Analysis
1999
Citation profile
49 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 49 later decisions — most recently January 2022 · most notably Commonwealth v. Drumheller (2002), Commonwealth v. Rollins (1999)
49 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 Witherspoon v. Illinois · Wainwright v. Witt · Darden v. Wainwright · Scharffe v. Perkins · Local 408, International Brotherhood of Teamsters v. National Labor Relations Board
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 49 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Cox was required to establish that the fact upon which he bases his claim was unknown to him and that he could not have discovered it through due diligence. The fact upon which Cox’s claim is based is the conclusion that the second Davis bullet was not fired from the gun used in the Watson murder. This conclusion resulted from the ballistics analysis performed by Officers Walker and Cruz. Cox did not discover this fact until Officers Walker and Cruz issued their report on April 30, 2013; it was therefore unknown to him until that date. Cox cannot, however, establish that he could not have ascertained this fact through the exercise of due diligence. ... Cox’s initial attempt to obtain the ballistics evidence was made in his first PCRA petition, in connection with his claim that counsel was ineffective for failing to seek independent ballistics testing. The salient question is whether in so doing, Cox acted with reasonable effort to discover the facts upon which his claim is based. ... [Tjhere is no question that Cox knew that more testing could be performed on the ballistics evidence at the time of trial in 1995. It was not until six years later, in 2001, that Cox first attempted to obtain the ballistics evidence through his first PCRA petition, in connection with his claim that trial counsel was ineffective for failing to seek independent testing thereof. By raising this claim in his first PCRA petition, Cox has effectively conceded that the testing could have been done at th”
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.