State v. Mitchell’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

20 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 20 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “well-established rules of evidence that permit trial judges to exclude evidence if its probative value is outweighed by certain other factors such as unfair prejudice, confusion of the issues, or potential to mislead the jury do not normally breach defendants’ constitutional rights, and ... one such well-established rule is the rule that a court may exclude a defendant’s evidence proffered to show that someone else committed the crime in question if that evidence is too speculative, remote, or immaterial. Thus, the Constitution does not prevent a court from reasonably regulating the admission of alternative suspect evidence so long as it serves a legitimate purpose, such as the goal of focusing the trial on the central issues by excluding evidence that has only a very weak logical connection to the central issues.”

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

2. “[a] defendant may not ... without evidence of a connection between the alternative suspect and the crime, use the trial process to question witnesses in hopes of eliciting information that would convert what amounts to speculation into a connection between the other person and the crime. We will uphold the exclusion of evidence if it is too speculative or conjectural or too disconnected from the facts of a defendant’s prosecution.”

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