People v. Gallego’s Empirical Analysis
1988
Citation profile
27 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 27 later decisions — most recently October 2002 · most notably Commonwealth v. Stipetich (1995), 121 N.C. App. 629 - State v. Sturgill (1996)
27 state decisions — followed in 11 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.
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 27 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[B]y enforcing the unauthorized promise made to [a] defendant, this Court would undermine the accountability built into the prosecutorial function. Unlike a [pjolice officer, the [prosecutor] is an elected official and thus accountable to the county’s electorate for [his or her] actions. Since the police possess neither the authority to withhold prosecution nor to grant immunity, no formal system exists by which to check the potentially unbridled discretion the police would possess if allowed to make binding promises precluding prosecution. The potential for abuse seems obvious.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage““Our numerous precedents ordering the exclusion of such illegally obtained evidence assume implicitly that the remedy does not extend to barring the prosecution altogether. So drastic a step might advance marginally some of the ends served by the exclusionary rules, but it would also increase to an intolerable degree interference in having the guilty brought to book.””
1 later decision 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.