Pfeifer v. State’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

1 district · 5 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 6 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““Likewise, we must reject defendant’s contention that the testimony of the stock yard [sic] employees, Jessup and Jones, is inadmissable [sic] as evidence obtained by the illegal arrest. In Smith v. United States, 117 U.S.App.D.C. 1 , 324 F.2d 879 (1964), certiorari denied 377 U.S. 954 , 84 S.Ct. 1632 , 12 L.Ed.2d 498 (1964), the Court excluded testimony of witnesses from the ‘fruit of the poisonous tree’ concept as follows: “ ‘The fact that the source of evidence is “tainted” by violation of constitutional or statutory provisions has not precluded the use of that evidence in every circumstance. [citations] “ ‘Here no confessions or utterances of the appellants were used against them; tangible evidence obtained from appellants, such as the victim’s watch, was suppressed along with the confessions. But a witness is not an inanimate object which like contraband narcotics, a pistol or stolen goods, “speak for themselves.” The proffer of a living witness is not to be mechanically equated with the proffer of inanimate evidentiary objects illegally seized. The fact that the name of a potential witness is disclosed to police is of no evidentiary significance, per se, since the living witness is an individual human personality whose attributes of will, perception, memory and volition interact to determine what testimony he will give. The uniqueness of this human process distinguishes the evidentiary character of a witness from the relative immutability of inanimate evidence.’ 324 F.2”

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

2. “To accept defendant's contention in regard to this evidence, it would be necessary to assume that but for the improper arrest the state never would have been able to discover the location of the cattle, photograph them, and locate the stock yard records. We must reject this conclusion since it seems quite apparent that even without the arrest of the defendant at that particular time and place, the state would have been able to locate the stolen cattle otherwise. There is nothing so unique about the weigh bill offered by the defendant or his admissions to the officers to indicate that this alone was the only source to the evidence which was subsequently admitted at the trial.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 440 So. 2d 1242 - Delap v. State

3. “The mere fact that the body was discovered at the particular time it was discovered because of Killough’s disclosure of its whereabouts in his illegally secured confessions is not determinative. . . . In time the body (or its bones) would have been discovered and would have been identified as that of Mrs. Killough.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Government of the Virgin Islands v. Gereau