State v. Ball’s Empirical Analysis
1983
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 1 district · 910 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 918 later decisions (4 by the Supreme Court) — most recently September 2025 · most notably Delaware v. Van Arsdall (1986), Arizona v. Evans (1995)
3 federal appellate · 1 district · 910 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 Coolidge v. New Hampshire · Michigan v. Long · Texas v. Brown · Hoffa v. United States · Cooper v. State of California
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 918 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[e]very subject hath a right to be secure from all unreasonable searches and seizures of his person, his houses, his papers, and all his possessions.”
10 later decisions quote this exact passage“[W]e note that not all hand-rolled cigarettes contain contraband. Consequently, we cannot say that observation of a hand-rolled cigarette, by itself, would lead a reasonable and prudent person to believe that the cigarette contained an illegal substance. To transform mere suspicion about the contents of the hand-rolled cigarette into a reasonable belief based on probable cause, the officer must articulate additional corroborating facts. For instance, it might be shown that the arresting officer had the ability to distinguish hand-rolled marijuana and tobacco cigarettes by sight, or that he perceived the odor of marijuana, or that the defendant made a furtive gesture in an attempt to conceal the cigarette, or that the defendant's conduct was otherwise incriminating. The record before us provides no evidence of such corroborating circumstances. . . . The record fails to show that the troopers had special expertise in identifying cigarettes containing illicit substances. On the contrary, the record states that Trooper-trainee Hamilton was unable to identify the cigarette, by sight, and that Trooper Hunter could not tell the difference between a hand-rolled tobacco cigarette and any other hand-rolled cigarette. It appears that the sole justification for the troopers' belief that the cigarette contained marijuana was that it was hand-rolled and pinched at the end.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage“[Wjhen this court cites federal or other State court opinions in construing provisions of the [Vermont] Constitution or statutes, we rely on those precedents merely for guidance and do not consider our results bound by those decisions.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Wood · Arizona v. Evans
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.