State v. Dickson’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

6 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 6 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “Defendant, asserting that he suffered from gonorrhea, undertook to prove the medical probability that, if he had had sexual intercourse with the alleged victim, the disease would have been communicated to her. Defendant admitted that he had a steady girl friend with whom he cohabited and with whom he was frequently intimate but that she did not have the disease. There was never a definitive medical diagnosis that he had the disease, the evidence being only that when he complained of it during his pretrial confinement he was routinely treated with medication without any effort to fully diagnose his ailment. The physician who had prescribed the medication for defendant had testified at trial, but defense counsel did not put any such question to that witness. Instead, he tendered as a witness a young physician whose experience consisted of a 1-year internship following graduation from medical school and a 3-month residency in which he was exposed to 30 or 40 cases of venereal disease. The trial court ruled that the witness was not qualified as an expert to give that opinion. * * * We conclude that the trial court was not clearly wrong and, in any event, the ex- eluded evidence was without prejudice under the circumstances.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. State v. Svoboda