187 W. Va. 686 - State v. Thomas’s Empirical Analysis
1992
Citation profile
40 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 40 later decisions — most recently October 2016 · most notably 203 W. Va. 561 - State v. Salmons (1998), 190 W. Va. 321 - In Re an Investigation of the West Virginia State Police Crime Laboratory (1993)
40 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 · Illinois v. Gates · Franks v. Delaware · Spinelli v. United States · United States v. Ventresca
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 40 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[w]hen the government performs a complicated test on evidence that is important to the determination of guilt, and in so doing destroys the possibility of an independent replication of the test, the government must preserve as much documentation of the test as is reasonably possible to allow for a full and fair examination of the results by a defendant and his experts.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“Probable cause for the issuance of a search warrant exists if the facts and-circumstances provided to a magistrate in a written affidavit are sufficient to warrant -the belief of a prudent person of reasonable caution that a crime has been committed and that the specific fruits, instrumen-talities, or contraband from that crime presently may be found at a specific location. It is not enough that a magistrate believes a crime has been committed. The magistrate also must have a reasonable belief that the place or person to be searched will yield certain specific classes of items. There must be a nexus between the criminal activity and the place or person searched and thing seized. The probable cause determination does not depend solely upon individual facts; rather, it depends on the cumulative effect of the facts in the totality of circumstances.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“In an ideal world, the State would be able to preserve enough of the sample that a completely independent test could be performed. However, we recognize that given the necessities of certain tests and the small quantities of available material, preservation of enough of the sample for an independent test may not be possible. That is why we accept the general proposition that the State does not commit a violation when it, in good faith, uses up the entire sample in performing a necessary scientific test. With that “right” comes a responsibility: the State must put the defendant in as nearly identical position as he would have been in had he been able to perform an independent test.”
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.