187 N.J. Super. 435 - State v. Bruzzese’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

2 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 2 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “We read the present record, and the conclusions of the trial judge, to establish that the seizure here was just such a ‘planned warrantless seizure.’ The police used a most anomalous procedure to effect an arrest in an adjoining town on a minor charge; an expressed reason for executing the contempt warrant by arrest was that defendant was a suspect in an entirely unrelated burglary and that ‘we wanted to talk to him’; the officer ‘had in the back of my mind’ that he might find the footgear to match the only physical evidence he had from that burglary; at the time of the arrest there was no suggestion that defendant was angry or exercised, likely to become violent or to escape, and the police, without advising defendant of their plan to ‘talk to him’ concerning the burglary, followed him without invitation into his own bedroom where they made the hoped-for ‘plain view’ observation. Those facts fully support the finding of the trial judge that the arrest and seizure went well beyond what could reasonably be attributed to an intent to arrest defendant on a contempt warrant; in these circumstances the conduct of the police in arresting defendant and remaining at his elbow must realistically be seen as a pretext to obtain a view of the interior of his house and, as it fortuitously worked out, to make a ‘plain view’ seizure. This kind of improper police procedure was specifically envisioned in ‘The Supreme Court, 1970 Term,’ 85 Harv.L.Rev. 3 (1971): ... where the police have probab”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. State v. Bruzzese

2. “Our finding of the invalidity of the alleged ‘plain view’ seizure is equally dispositive of the State’s alternate contention that the seizure here was the product of a search incident to arrest. Not only did the officers testify that they did not conduct a search at all, but a search conducted upon the pretextual arrest would also be invalid under the authorities already cited. See, generally, Burkoff, ‘Bad Faith Searches,’ supra.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. State v. Bruzzese