252 N.J. Super. 369 - State v. Williams’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

4 district · 43 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 50 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““The State offered an array of experts in molecular biology and genetics with unimpeachable credentials. All had authored and published countless articles about the PCR technique. They all opined that the PCR technique has gained tire general acceptance of scientists in the particular field in which it belongs. “The range of expert testimony offered by the State included Dr. Henry A. Erlich, Director of the Human Genetics Department at Cetus Corporation, Dr. Haig H. Kazazian, Director of the Center for Medical Genetics at John Hopkins University, School of Medicine, Dr. Dennis R. Pontani, a research scientist with the New Jersey Department of Health, who specializes in biology, Dr. David H. Bing, Scientific Director of the Center for Blood Research Laboratories, which is affiliated with Harvard Medical School in Boston, and Dr. Henry C. Lee, forensic scientist and Director of the Connecticut State Police Forensic Science Laboratory. The test itself was conducted by Dr. Edward T. Blake, a forensic serologist at the Forensic Science Associates Laboratory in California, who has conducted thousands of forensic examinations and testified as an expert hundreds of times in state and federal courts in over one-half the states, including about 20 to 25 times an expert witness on DNA, PCR and DQ alpha techniques. “These highly qualified scientists testified to the overwhelming acceptance within the scientific community of PCR-amplified DNA testing. Each was fully familiar with the scie”

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

2. “The PCR technique was developed in 1985 by Cetus Corporation, which developed an inexpensive kit that has a simplified procedure to amplify a specific region of DNA in a sufficient quantity to allow for its analysis. In a matter of hours a targeted segment of DNA can be amplified in exact replicas a millionfold which can then easily be analyzed. A scientist can select any section of interest from a DNA molecule, typically a single set of genes, and amplify only that part. The result is that fragments of DNA formerly too small to analyze can now be amplified and easily analyzed. Currently there is only one PCR based genetic marker system commercially available for forensic analysis, which is the HLA DQ Alpha test system produced by Cetus Corporation.... The HLA DQ Alpha typing system works in that a person’s genotype is detected by what is called a reverse dot blot method. The significant advantage of this system is that it is easy to standardize its results, which removes the risk of typing errors. Indeed, those using the PCR technique are constantly subjected to “blind” testing to measure the accuracy of the results and they have been almost unanimously positive.”

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