275 Ga. App. 869 - Maddox v. State’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

7 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 7 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “Maddox charges his trial attorney with ineffective assistance in failing to object to testimony by the psychologist who conducted the pretrial interview of T.M. Maddox argues that certain testimony given by the psychologist amounted to improper bolstering of T.M.’s credibility. There is no merit in this argument. The psychologist was qualified as an expert in the field of conducting forensic interviews of children in sexual abuse cases. She testified to her training and experience, which included conducting hundreds of such interviews. After the videotape of the interview was played to the jury, the prosecutor commented that T.M. had not given any specific dates on which events had happened, and the psychologist was asked whether that was uncommon. The psychologist responded that it is more uncommon for a child (or for an adult) to be able to specify incident dates where, as here, there has been a recurrence of events over a prolonged period. Improper bolstering occurs when an expert witness is allowed to give his or her opinion as to whether the complaining witness is telling the truth, because that is an ultimate issue of fact and the inference to be drawn is not beyond the ken of the average juror. Here, the witness testified on the basis of her experience in forensic interviewing as to the ability of interviewees to recall certain things in certain situations. That was in no way a comment on an ultimate issue of fact. And the court was authorized to find that the conclusi”

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