12 Va. App. 337 - Farmer v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1991
Citation profile
75 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 75 later decisions — most recently May 2016 · most notably 21 Va. App. 519 - Gilliam v. Commonwealth (1996), 21 Va. App. 729 - Bennefield v. Commonwealth (1996)
75 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 Schmerber v. State of California · South Dakota v. Neville · Pennsylvania v. Muniz · Doe v. United States · Walton v. City of Roanoke
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 75 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“It could not be denied that in requiring petitioner to submit to the withdrawal and chemical analysis of his blood the State compelled him to submit to an attempt to discover evidence that might be used to prosecute him.... The critical question, then, is whether petitioner was thus compelled “to be a witness against himself.” [Bjoth federal and state courts have usually held that [the Fifth Amendment] offers no protection against compulsion to submit to fingerprinting, photographing, or measurements, to write or speak for identification, to appear in court, to stand, to assume a stance, to walk, or to make a particular gesture. The distinction which has emerged, often expressed in different ways, is that the privilege is a bar against compelling “communications” or “testimony,” but that compulsion which makes a suspect or accused the source of “real or physical evidence” does not violate it. Not even a shadow of testimonial compulsion upon or enforced communication by the accused was involved either in the extraction or in the chemical analysis.... Since the blood test evidence, although an incriminating product of compulsion, was neither petitioner’s testimony nor evidence relating to some communicative act or writing by the petitioner, it was not inadmissible on [Fifth Amendment ] privilege grounds.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“[u]se of the fact that he refused enables the state to obtain communicative evidence to which it would otherwise have no right, as a result of defendant's refusal to provide noncommunicative evidence to which it also had no right.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“The failure of an accused to permit a blood or breath sample to be taken to determine the alcohol or drug content of his blood is not evidence and shall not be subject to comment by the Commonwealth at the trial of the case, except in rebuttal; nor shall the fact that a blood or breath test had been offered the accused be evidence or the subject of comment by the Commonwealth, except in rebuttal.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
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.