409 So. 2d 955 - Thomas v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1981
Citation profile
19 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 19 later decisions — most recently May 2010
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 Johnson v. State · 278 So. 2d 781 - State v. Moore · 350 So. 2d 708 - Williams v. State · Scott v. State · State v. Davis
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 19 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“identity exception to the general exclusionary rule only becomes applicable when the identity of the person who committed the now-charged crime is in issue.”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage“"[T]he identity exception to the general exclusionary rule . . . . contemplates the situation where the now-charged crime was committed in a novel and peculiar manner and the state is allowed to show that the accused has committed other similar offenses, in the same novel and peculiar manner, in order to show him the perpetrator of the now charged crime." C. Gamble, McElroy's Alabama Evidence , § 69.01 (8) (3d ed. 1977).”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“"[I]n practice it rarely occurs that the evidential mark [to support an inference of identity] is a single circumstance. The evidencing feature is usually a group of circumstances, which as a whole constitute a feature capable of being associated with a single object. Rarely can one circumstance alone be so inherently peculiar to a single object. It is by adding circumstance to circumstance that we obtain a composite feature or mark which as a whole cannot be supposed to be associated with more than a single object. "The process of construing an inference of identity thus usually consists in adding together a number of circumstances, each of which by itself might be a feature of many objects, but all of which together make it more probable that they coexist in a single object only."”
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.