37 Cal. 3d 351 - People v. McDonald’s Empirical Analysis
1984
Citation profile
49 federal appellate · 6 district · 582 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 648 later decisions — most recently July 2021 · most notably 51 Cal. 3d 120 - Moore v. Regents of University of California (1990), United States v. Downing (1985)
49 federal appellate · 6 district · 582 state decisions — followed in 36 states
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 United States v. Wade · Green v. United States · 46 Cal. 2d 818 - People v. Watson · Frye v. United States · 17 Cal. 3d 24 - People v. Kelly
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 648 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“When an eyewitness identification of the defendant is a key element of the prosecution’s case but is not substantially corroborated by evidence giving it independent reliability, and the defendant offers qualified expert testimony on specific psychological factors shown by the record that could have affected the accuracy of the identification but are not likely to be fully known to or understood by the jury, it will ordinarily be error to exclude that testimony.”
9 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. Jackson v. Ylst · State v. DuBray“It is important to distinguish in this regard between expert testimony and scientific evidence. When a witness gives his personal opinion on the stand — even if he qualifies as an expert — the jurors may temper their acceptance of his testimony with a healthy skepticism born of their knowledge that all human beings are fallible. But the opposite may be true when the evidence is produced by a machine: like many laypersons, jurors tend to ascribe an inordinately high degree of certainty to proof derived from an apparently “scientific” mechanism, instrument or procedure. Yet the aura of infallibility that often surrounds such evidence may well conceal the fact that it remains experimental and tentative. * * # * * * Here, by contrast, no such methods are in issue. We have never applied the Kelly-Frye rule to expert medical testimony, even when the witness is a psychiatrist and the subject matter is as esoteric as the reconstitution of a past state of mind or the prediction of future dangerousness, or even the diagnosis of an unusual form of mental illness not listed in the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association____”
8 later decisions quote this exact passage“`The jury need not be wholly ignorant of the subject matter of the [expert] opinion in order to justify its admission.... [Expert testimony] will be excluded only when it would add nothing at all to the jury's common fund of information....'”
4 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.