State v. Grimes’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

8 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 8 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “The Cellmark report is very different from the sort of extrajudicial statements, such as affidavits, depositions, prior testimony, and confessions, that the Confrontation Clause was originally understood to reach. The report was produced before any suspect was identified. The report was sought not for the purpose of obtaining evidence to be used against petitioner, who was not even under suspicion at the time, but for the purpose of finding a rapist who was on the loose. And the profile that Cell-mark provided was not inherently incul-patory. On the contrary, a DNA profile is evidence that tends to exculpate all but one of the more than 7 billion people in the world today. The use of DNA evidence to exonerate persons who have been wrongfully accused or convicted is well known. If DNA profiles could not be introduced without calling the technicians who participated in the preparation of the profile, economic pressures would encourage prosecutors to forgo DNA testing and rely instead on older forms of evidence, such as eyewitness identification, that are less reliable. See Perry v. New Hampshire, 565 U.S.-, 132 S.Ct. 716 , 181 L.Ed.2d 694 (2012). The Confrontation Clause does not mandate such an undesirable development. This conclusion will not prejudice any defendant who really wishes to probe the reliability of the DNA testing done in a particular case because those who participated in the testing may always be subpoenaed by the defense and questioned at trial.”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. 220 So. 3d 128 - State v. Jones · 133 So. 3d 258 - State v. Webb

2. “The U.S. Supreme Court framed the issue presented in Williams as whether Crawford “bar[s] an expert from expressing an opinion based on facts about a case that have been made known to the expert but about which the expert is not competent to testify[.]” Williams, — U.S. at-, 132 S.Ct. at 2227 . The Court held that “this form of expert testimony does not violate the Confrontation Clause because that provision has no application to out-of-court statements that are not offered to prove the truth of the matter asserted.... Out-of-court statements that are related by the expert solely for the purpose of explaining the assumptions on which that opinion rests are not offered for their truth and thus fall outside the scope of the Confrontation Clause.” Williams, — U.S. at -, 132 S.Ct. at 2228 . Williams stated that its conclusion was entirely consistent with Bullcoming and Melendez-Diaz , explaining: In those cases, the forensic reports were introduced into evidence, and there is no question that this was done for the purpose of proving the truth of |32what they ásserted: in Bullcoming that the defendant’s blood alcohol level exceeded the legal limit and in Melendez-Diaz that the substance in question contained cocaine. Nothing comparable happened here. In this case, the Cellmark report was not introduced into evidence. An expert witness referred to the report not to prove the truth of the matter asserted in the report, i.e., that the report contained an accurate profile of the perpe”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 133 So. 3d 258 - State v. Webb