Dowdy v. State’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

7 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 7 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““ ‘To be privileged, the subject of the communication must be one that would not have been disclosed except for the marital relation, as privilege extends only to confidential communications, and does not cover topics incident to general intercourse or facts which come to the knowledge of the testifying spouse by means equally accessible to persons standing in the marital relation.’ Wharton’s Criminal Evidence § 1250. “ ‘As a general rule, to make a communication between husband and wife privileged, it must be confidential in its nature, or at least not obviously of a different character. Wherever a communication, because of its nature or the circumstances under which it was made, is obviously not intended to be confidential, it is not privileged.’ 58 Am.Jur., Witnesses, § 380. “ ‘The essence of the privilege is to protect confidences only. This is inevitably required by the very nature of this class of privileges (ante, § 2285). The purpose is to insure subjectively the free and unrestrained privacy of communication, divested of any apprehension of compulsory disclosure; and if the communication is not intended to be a private one, the privilege has no application to it.’ Wigmore on Evidence, Third Edition, § 2336.””

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