People v. Smith’s Empirical Analysis
1974
Citation profile
30 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 30 later decisions — most recently October 2012 · most notably People v. Thatcher (1981), People v. Hedrick (1976)
30 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 · Alderman v. United States · Giles v. State of Maryland · Maisel v. People · Cheatwood v. People
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 30 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“`* * * A criminal trial is not a game in which the State's function is to outwit and entrap its quarry. The State's pursuit is justice, not a victim. If it has in its exclusive possession specific, concrete evidence which is not merely cumulative or embellishing and which may exonerate the defendant or be of material importance to the defenseregardless of whether it relates to testimony which the State has caused to be given at trialthe State is obliged to bring it to the attention of the court and the defense. * * ' We are in agreement with the foregoing statement. See People v. Walker, 180 Colo. 184 ; 504 P.2d 1098 ; Cheatwood v. People, 164 Colo. 334 , 435 P.2d 402 . "Moreover, in our view the determination of usefulness of evidence in this context is a defense function, not a prosecutorial function. In certain cases even an in camera hearing imposes unfairness on the defense, as only the defense can determine what will be material and helpful to its case. See Alderman v. United States, 394 U.S. 165 , 89 S.Ct. 961 , 22 L.Ed.2d 176 .”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[t]he thrust of our discovery rules is to discourage legal games of `blindman's bluff,'”
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.