Williams v. Illinois’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

33 federal appellate · 9 district · 241 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 321 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “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.”

   12 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. Naquin v. State · Polk v. State

2. “[T]he primary purpose of the Cellmark report, viewed. objectively, was not to accuse petitioner or to create evidence .for use at trial. When the ISP lab sent the sample to Cellmark, its primary purpose was to catch a dangerous rapist who was still at lai’ge, not to obtain ■ evidence for use against petitioner, who was neither in custody nor under suspicion at that time. Similarly, no one at ■Cellmark could have possibly known that the profile that-it produced would turn out to inculpate petitioner — or for that matter, anyone else whose DNA profile was in a law enforcement database. Under these circumstances, there was no “prospect of -fabrication” and no incentive to produce anything other than a scientifically sound and -reliable profile.”

   11 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. State v. Brian Watson · State v. Rozerick E. Mattox

3. “(1) “ex parte in-court testimony or its functional equivalent — that is, material such as affidavits, custodial examinations, prior testimony that the defendant was unable to cross-examine, or similar pretrial statements that declarants would reasonably expect to be used proseeutorially,” (2) “extrajudicial statements contained in formalized testimonial materials, such as affidavits, depositions, prior testimony, or confessions,” and (3) “statements that were made under circumstances which would lead an objective witness reasonably to believe that the statement would be available for use at a later trial.””

   11 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. United States v. Cameron · State v. Brian Watson