State v. Mitchell’s Empirical Analysis
1984
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 29 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 31 later decisions — most recently September 2013 · most notably State v. Beaty (1988), State v. Schad (1989)
2 federal appellate · 29 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 Brady v. State of Maryland · Chapman v. State of California · Harrington v. California · 12 Cal. 3d 641 - People v. Hitch · 26 Cal. 3d 169 - People v. Nation
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 31 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“His big complaint in this area is how would you feel if you were Gary Mitchell and you’re on trial for a case like this and the enzymes were lost. I would just like to give you the converse of that and say how would you feel if you were Cheryl Morrison and you picked out the man that raped you and you said this is him, there is no doubt in my mind about that, and the jury found the guy not guilty just because the police didn’t refrigerate those enzymes? How would that feel? That would be a miscarriage of justice if that were the case, if Cheryl Morrison had to find out this man was found not guilty just because the police had not refrigerated those enzymes.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“How would you like to be sitting at the defense table charged with a crime, there’s no physical evidence. You’ve got an eye witness. That’s the sum total of the evidence. You can’t really cross-examine them. How would you like to be sitting there thinking the police could have put something in a plastic bag and saved it for a couple of months and that could prove your innocence? You can’t get at it. What would you be feeling right now?”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“If you find that the plaintiff, the State of Arizona, has destroyed, caused to be destroyed, or allowed to be destroyed any evidence whose contents or quality are an issue, you may infer that the true fact is against their interests.”
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.