State v. Patterson’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

1 federal appellate · 32 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 34 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “In Terry v. Ohio [citation omitted], the U.S. Supreme Court held that when a police officer suspects that criminal activity may be afoot, he may approach a person for purposes of investigating criminal behavior even though there is no probable cause to make an arrest. Nebraska has adopted this standard for investigatory stops. [Citations omitted.]... In Patterson’s case, it is not necessary that we decide the issue of whether the informant’s information was sufficient to provide probable cause for a warrant, since Patterson was legally stopped and arrested under the lesser Terry standard____ When looking at the totality of the information provided by the informant, together with corroboration of this information by police, the officers had sufficient reasonable suspicion under Terry to stop Patterson after he left his home that evening, in order to investigate possible drug activity. . . . When Patterson failed to pull over as instructed by the officers, but instead fled from the scene, probable cause to believe Patterson was engaged in illegal drug activity arose, and the police were entitled to place him under arrest. The search of Patterson’s person, whereby the cocaine was discovered in his underwear, was reasonable under the fourth amendment as a search incident to arrest.”

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