State v. Sabartinelli’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

4 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 4 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “[Fjrom the viewpoint of the observer, an innocent gesture can often be mistaken for a guilty movement. He must not only perceive the gesture accurately, he must also interpret it in accordance with the actor’s true intent. But if words are not infrequently ambiguous, gestures are even more so. Many are wholly nonspecific, and can be assigned a meaning only in their context. Yet the observer may view that context quite otherwise from the actor: not only is his vantage point different, he may even have approached the scene with a preconceived notion — consciously or subconsciously— of what gestures he expected to see and what he expected them to mean. The potential for misunderstanding in such a situation is obvious.”

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

2. “furtive gesture coupled with prior reliable information”

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