People v. Tomasello’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

8 federal appellate · 9 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 17 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “Immunity under these statutes need extend only to prosecution for past crimes — not to prosecution for future crimes or for perjury or contempt in connection with the very process of making the disclosure itself ... If argument were needed, it would be sufficient merely to appeal to the terms of the privilege, which forbids that one be compelled to give evidence against himself— for the perjured utterance is not “evidence” or “testimony” to a crime but is the very act of crime itself; the compulsion is not to testify falsely but to testify truly; and the privilege by hypothesis would have been violated only if the witness had truly given self-incriminating evidence, but if he falsely exonerates himself, he has confessed no fact “against himself,” hence his privilege has not been infringed by the actual answer even though it might have been by some other answer.”

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