State v. Thomas’s Empirical Analysis
1978
Citation profile
19 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 22 later decisions — most recently April 2019
19 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Relies on Linkletter v. Walker · Starnes v. Penrod Drilling Co. · United States v. Di Re · Wenzler v. Pitchess · 70 Cal. 2d 347 - People v. Curtis
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 22 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“a person may not resist an arrest reasonably effected by one whom the arrestee knows or has good reason to know is a peace officer, despite legality or illegality of the arrest”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“More important [than the existence of civil remedies], however, are the unwarranted dangers to civil order caused by this lingering artifact. Peace officers are today lethally armed and usually well trained to efficiently effect arrests. Resultantly, the resister's chances of success are seriously diminished unless he counters with equal or greater levels of force. The inevitable escalation of violence has serious consequences for both participants and innocent bystanders. Briefly stated, a far more reasonable course is to resolve an often difficult arrest legality issue in the courts rather than on often hectic and emotion laden streets. Modern urbanized society has a strong interest in encouraging orderly dispute resolution. Confronting this is the outmoded common law rule which fosters unnecessary violence in the name of an obsolete self-help concept which should be promptly discarded.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“A person is not authorized to use force to resist an arrest ... which the person knows is being made either by a peace officer ... even if the person believes that the arrest is unlawful or the arrest is in fact unlawful.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.