Commonwealth v. Santos’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

2 district · 14 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 16 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “"Inability to produce a license or a registration reasonably gives rise to a suspicion of other offenses, such as automobile theft, and justifies heightened precautions for the officers' own safety. "Faced with this situation, the officer's entry into the car was justified .... First, prior to allowing the defendant to reenter the car to obtain the registration, the officers could properly effect a Terry -type search of the areas of the car which would be readily accessible to the defendant on reentering. The purpose of the search would be protective only, analogous to a pat frisk of the defendant's person for weapons. The reasonableness of a scan for weapons turns, we think, not so much on the finding that the defendant bent down and to the right before leaving the car, ... but on the particular danger to an officer when the person he is investigating is seated in a car with his movements concealed from the officer's view. The same concerns that allow an officer investigating a traffic violation to order the driver out of the car for the officer's safety ... also allow a limited search of the passenger compartment for weapons before the passenger reenters the car to obtain the registration. Courts cannot be oblivious to the recent escalation in the numbers of incidents reported wherein police officers have been killed or wounded while performing routine traffic functions. '[W]e think it crucial to remember that, as shown by many staged climaxes to threshold police inquiries,”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 94 Mass. App. Ct. 635 - Commonwealth v. Darosa

2. “could properly retrieve the registration from the place where the defendant said it would be, rather than have the defendant reenter the protective and partially concealing interior of the car, for the ostensible purpose of retrieving it himself.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 94 Mass. App. Ct. 635 - Commonwealth v. Darosa

3. “the search was investigatory, as it was designed to uncover evidence related to ... the identity of the defendant, and not to search for weapons.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Commonwealth v. Carter