Wallen v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1983
Citation profile
1 federal appellate · 16 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 18 later decisions — most recently December 2016
1 federal appellate · 16 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 Doyle v. Ohio · United States v. Davis · Wells v. Commonwealth · Lynem v. Commonwealth · Meyer v. Commonwealth
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 18 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[N]ot every isolated instance referring to post-arrest silence will be reversible error. It is only reversible error where post-arrest silence is deliberately used to impeach an explanation subsequently offered at trial or where there is a similar reason to believe the defendant has been prejudiced by reference to the exercise of his constitutional right. The usual situation where reversal occurs is where the prosecutor has repeated and emphasized post-arrest silence as a prosecutorial tool.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage““We have not engaged in any blanket condemnation of prosecutorial comment related to deterrence. We have condemned argument only where the prosecutor suggests that the jury convict or punish on grounds or for reasons not reasonably inferred from the evidence.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage“[t]aken as a whole the prosecutor's argument does not suggest that this defendant be punished inappropriately, but only as 'will fit the situation.”
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.