Dail v. Price’s Empirical Analysis
1944
Citation profile
2 district · 19 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 21 later decisions — most recently June 2017
2 district · 19 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 Avirett v. State · Leon v. State · Goodman v. State · Kaefer v. State · Green v. State
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 21 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Prior to 1975, § 551 had directed that property “be restored to the person from whom it was taken” only in cases where that taking had been somehow improper, at least illegal if not actually unconstitutional. Chapter 704 of the Acts of 1975 added an additional set of circumstances when property should be returned, one where the initial search and seizure had been perfectly proper but where the criminal case had since been nol-prossed or dismissed or had resulted in an acquittal. Under such circumstances, all property “except contraband or any property prohibited by law from being recoverable, may be returned to the person to whom it belongs without the necessity of that person instituting an action for replevin or any other legal proceeding against the agency having custody of the property.” This set of circumstances does not remotely involve the Exclusionary Rule or any other rule of evidence. It is substantive law, not procedural law. It only comes into play after the trial is over or the prosecution otherwise terminated. A prophylactic rule, moreover, aimed (as is the Exclusionary Rule) at deterring future police misbehavior, would have no utility in circumstances such as these where there has been no police misbehavior. This aspect of § 551, furthermore, directs that the property be returned not “to the person from whom it was taken” but rather “to the person to whom it belongs.” Here is a significant difference. Here, the rightful owner of stolen property could invoke th”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.