State v. Ricker’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

1 district · 18 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 19 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “To be admissible, the evidence concerning a witness' reputation for truthfulness "must embody the collective judgment of the community and be derived from a group whose size constitutes an indicium of inherent reliability." State v. Mazerolle, 614 A.2d 68, 73 (Me.1992) (quotation marks and citations omitted). Evidence of reputation is considered reliable only if the community holding the opinion of reputation is sufficiently large. Id. If the group is too insular, its opinion of the witness' reputation for truthfulness may not be reliable because it may have been formed with the same set of biases. State v. Cyr, 767 A.2d 307, 310 (Me.2001). While it may be that a child's community is smaller than an adult's community, the child's community must be sufficiently numerous for the opinion of reputation to be reliable, and the members of that community must have had sufficient contacts with the child to justify an opinion of reputation. Here, the only evidence consists of a reputation for untruthfulness among family members. The father's testimony about the opinions of a teacher and a crisis center worker must be discounted because the testimony was not about the niece's reputation, but consisted of the statements of these two people about specif-ie occasions when the niece had not been truthful. Thus, the only evidence of the reputation of the niece is her reputation among certain members of the father's family.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Norton v. State

2. “The burden is on the proponent of reputation evidence to satisfy the foundational requirements of such evidence including the requirement that the community be sufficiently large and diverse to give the reputation evidence the reliability required for admissibility. We review the exclusion of reputation evidence for an abuse of discretion.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. In Re Rachel J.

3. “must embody the collective judgment of the community and be derived from a group whose size constitutes an indicium of inherent reliability.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Norton v. State