State v. Poole’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

12 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 12 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “decision to admit testimony that may implicate the confrontation clause is ... a question of law reviewed for correctness.”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. State v. Zaragoza · State v. Goins

2. “(1) the witness is unavailable at trial, (2) the witness's unavailability was caused by a wrongful act of the defendant, and (8) the defendant's act was done with an intent to make the witness unavailable 7 Id. 120 (emphasis added). In this case, the trial court applied the forfeiture-by-wrongdoing doctrine to reach its conclusion that Defendant caused Wife's unavailability through the wrongful act of contacting Wife 276 times by phone. The trial court found that the calls were intended to influence her and were made in violation of the court's no-contact order 8 Defendant asserts that the court's application of the doctrine was overly expansive, essentially concluding that any act, including encouraging a spouse to withhold privileged testimony, undertaken with the intent to procure a witness's unavailability is per se wrongful. In challenging the court's wrongful act determination, Defendant fails to acknowledge that the specific acts the court considered in its determination-276 phone calls Defendant initiated from jail-were undertaken in violation of a no-contact order. The trial court specifically referenced those phone calls and the content of those calls and found that there was more than a preponderance of the evidence to show that "this defendant engaged in witness tampering to attempt to induce someone from withholding testimony, change somebody's testimony, influence the testimony that may be given at trial.”

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

3. “Matters of constitutional interpretation are questions of law that we review for correctness, and we provide no deference to the district court's legal conclusions. The district court's decision to admit testimony that may implicate the confrontation clause is also a question of law reviewed for correctness.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 2012 UT App 366 - State v. Gonzalez-Camargo