People v. Dye’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

2 federal appellate · 1 district · 4 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 14 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “Early in the morning of August 29,1982, [Donna Bartels and Glenda Collins] were killed in the clubhouse of the Forbidden Wheels Motorcycle Club. They had each been shot through the head. Their bodies were dumped on the curb of a residential street and discovered there by early morning commuters. Four club members were in the clubhouse at the time of the murders. Dye, Bruce Seidel, James Dawson, and Steve Stever all admitted to helping clean up the clubhouse after the killings. Seidel, the prosecution’s chief witness, accused Dye of killing the women. Dye accused Seidel of being the killer. Dawson and Stever, who had been in an upstairs apartment apparently asleep at the time of the killings, testified that Seidel walked upstairs, awakened them, and told them that Dye had just killed two women. Seidel, Dawson, and Stever further testified that after Seidel and Dye dumped the bodies, all four met in Stever’s garage, where Dye admitted to the killings.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Dye v. Hofbauer

2. “it is obvious that the first mistrial resulted from the jury’s inability to give credence to the testimony of Seidel, Stever, and Dawson. The inability of the jury at the second trial to view the demeanor of these witnesses therefore greatly reduced the validity and reliability of its evaluation of the witnesses’ credibility. In fact, over the objection of the defense counsel, the individuals reading the prior testimony in the second trial were allowed to embellish the written words with dramatic effects.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Dye v. Hofbauer

3. “transcript of prior testimony may [,] nevertheless[,] be offered in evidence upon a showing that the witness is unavailable and that the testimony bears satisfactory indicia of reliability.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Hicks v. Straub