216 So. 3d 73 - State v. Thibodeaux’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

2 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 2 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “[W]hen Zeb and Charlie returned with the scene photographs, they showed those to me, and I am not a blood splatter expert, but I told Zeb and Charlie-I paint. My wife and I paint the walls in our house, so I'm familiar with what paint does when you flick it off of a paintbrush. If you go straight on at a 90-degree angle, it makes little round circles, and makes those little things kind of shoot outwards, but if you hit a wall at an angle, it gives a tadpole effect, and in the scene photographs that they had shown me, over the headboard were these tadpole-like blood splatter findings, and, to me, that meant that it was at an angle at the time of discharge, or at the time that the pellets hit the body and the blood had expelled from the body, and then, on another wall which was adjacent to that and to the side-alongside of the bed, the blood splatter was straight on, and so I thought there were two different trajectories, one at an angle- MR. ALEXANDER: Your Honor, I'm going to object because he's just said he's not a blood splatter expert but he's proceeding to give opinion evidence on blood splatter. A Well, I'm not finished, sir. THE COURT: State? MR. BRYANT: He's allowed to testify as to-he's a forensic pathologist who's allowed to testify as to what opinions he came to as to why he continued his investigation into this matter, and he is-he viewed the photographs and why he continued his investigation into this matter, Your Honor. I think he's more than qualified to do this”

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