Baca v. Smith’s Empirical Analysis
1979
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 101 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 103 later decisions — most recently April 2010 · most notably Stephan v. State (1985), State v. Rivera (1987)
2 federal appellate · 101 state decisions — followed in 10 states
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 Brady v. State of Maryland · Romano v. United States · Giles v. State of Maryland · 12 Cal. 3d 641 - People v. Hitch · United States v. Carlton E. Bryant, United States of America v. William E. Turner
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 103 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[T]he right to test incriminating evidence where the evidence is completely destroyed by testing becomes all the more important because the defense has little or no recourse to alternate scientific means of contesting the test results, and therefore, when requested, the police must take and preserve a separate sample for the suspect by means of a field collection unit.”
6 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence““The failure of the state to collect and preserve evidence, when those acts can be accomplished as a mere incident to a procedure routinely performed by state agents, is tantamount to suppression of that evidence. It is incumbent upon the state to employ regular procedures to preserve evidence which a state agent, in the regular performance of his duties, could reasonably foresee ‘might’ be ‘favorable’ to the accused . . . We hold, therefore, that in all cases where the defendant elects to submit to a breath test to determine his blood alcohol level, he must be given a separate sample of his breath at the time of the test if that test is to be used as evidence.””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Littlefield“Destruction of the ampoule deprives the defendant of a crucial source of evidence with which to attack the validity of the test reading and hence the presumption. In light of the obvious importance to the petitioner of being able to rebut the presumption of intoxication we hold that destruction of the ampoule was prejudicial to the defense.”
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.