People v. Brown’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

3 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 9 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “The logical and practical problem is that even accepting ungrudgingly, as one should, the police officer's expertness in detecting a pattern of conduct characteristic of a particular criminal activity, the detected pattern, being only the superficial part of a sequence, does not provide probable cause for arrest if the same sketchy pattern occurs just as frequently or even more frequently in innocent transactions. The point is that the pattern is equivocal and is neither uniquely or generally associated with criminal conduct, and unless it is, there is no probable cause. Thus, for example, the observation of a known or obvious prostitute talking to a man she meets (or accosts) on the street does not establish probable cause. More of a pattern must be shown, either by proof of the conversation or ensuing culpable conduct. "Nor does it suffice to reason from the results of other searches, conducted under similar circumstances, to establish probable cause. There will be too many times in which the search made in the same circumstances yields no contraband and the transaction ends up in a nonarrest which, of course, is not recorded. "It would be dangerous, indeed, to find probable cause for arrest in every two-phased meeting of a narcotics addict and another ending in a vaguely described `movement of hands'”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Commonwealth v. Norwood

2. “Although the observed acts of the defendant and the suspected narcotics addict were not inconsistent with a culpable narcotics transaction, they were also susceptible of many innocent interpretations, even between persons with a narcotics background. The behavior, at most `equivocal and suspicious', was not supplemented by any additional behavior raising `the level of inference from suspicion to probable cause.'”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Commonwealth v. Norwood