State v. Worrall’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

6 federal appellate · 46 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 52 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “We doubt that there is a police station or sheriffs office in Montana that does not have paper and pens for note-taking and, more than likely, a typewriter for preparing statements, a tape recorder for recording those, and, in many cases, audio-visual recording equipment. Memorializing the reading of an accused’s rights, or an accused’s confession or, as in the case at bar, a citizen informant’s statement in the controlled environment of the station house, absent exigent circumstances, is neither an onerous nor a high-tech enterprise. Importantly, doing so avoids the sort of “who said what to whom” challenges that require trial courts to be arbiters of the credibility disputes that are nearly always resolved against the defendant. Indeed, we cannot envision any legitimate reason why the investigating officer would notin the ordinary case-memorialize in some fashion the taking of a witness’s or informant’s statement and, instead, choose to rely on his or her own memory of what was said, when the accuracy of those recollections might become critical weeks or months after the interview in proceedings implicating the fundamental rights of the defendant as well as the very ability of the state to successfully prosecute the case. No part of the criminal justice system, be it law enforcement, the prosecution, the defense, or the court, is well-served by this sort of slipshod approach.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. State v. Deines

2. “The search warrant application related that Erik personally observed marijuana plants on Worrall's property, that he recognized the plants as marijuana, and that he knew the difference between marijuana plants and tomato plants. These assertions were sufficient to demonstrate the reasonable probability that Erik's information was reliable and not merely speculative.”

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

3. “[d]ivining the intent of the search warrant applicant is irrelevant; misstatements and inaccuracies, whether intentional or unintentional, may produce the same constitutionally impermissible result—a search based upon something other than probable cause.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. State v. Chenoweth