114 Ohio App. 3d 299 - State v. Greer’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

2 district · 22 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 25 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “The case before us involves a police officer’s mistake of law, rather than a mistake of fact. Courts must be cautious in overlooking police officers’ mistakes of law, for the reasons set forth in People v. Teresinski (1980), 26 Cal.3d 457, at 462-464 , 162 Cal.Rptr. 44, at 47 , 605 P.2d 874 , at 876-877: “If we were to find Officer Rocha’s mistake of law [that the observed conduct violated a loitering ordinance] reasonable under these circumstances, we would provide a strong incentive to police officers to remain ignorant of the language of the laws that they enforce and of the teachings of judicial decisions whose principal function frequently is to construe such laws and to chart the proper limits of police conduct.” Even that court hinted that the result might be different under exceptional circumstances: “We need not decide, however, whether under exceptional circumstances an officer’s reasonable mistake of law might validate police conduct because in this case the officer’s mistake cannot be found reasonable.” Id. Similarly, in People v. Molenda (1979), 71 Ill.App.3d 908 , 28 Ill.Dec. 393, 394 , 390 N.E.2d 560, 561 , an Illinois court, in holding that an officer’s mistake of law invalidated a stop, opined: “We might be of a different view if the statute was ambiguous, or required judicial construction to determine its scope or meaning.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 3 F. Supp. 2d 654 - United States v. Beckman