United States v. Brown’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

30 federal appellate · 2 district · 18 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 53 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “One critical problem (of eyewitness identifications) concerns their reliability, yet courts regularly protest their lack of interest in the reliability of identifications, as opposed to the suggestivity that may have prompted them, arguing that reliability is simply a question of fact for the jury. (Citation omitted). There already exists, however, great doubts — if not firm evidence — about the adequacy and accuracy of the process. Unquestionably, identifications are often unreliable— perhaps consistently less reliable than lie detector tests, which we have in the past excluded for unreliability.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
   e.g. Gibbs v. Commonwealth

2. “The data on this point is unfortunately meager, but it offers at least tentative support for the widely-held, common sense view that whites have greater difficulty identifying blacks than identifying other whites. And it also seems true that blacks can identify other blacks more easily than they can identify whites.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
   e.g. United States v. Telfaire

3. “the accused has the opportunity for a meaningful confrontation of the [State's] case at trial through the ordinary processes of cross-examination of the [State's] expert [handwriting] witnesses and the presentation of the evidence of his own [handwriting] experts.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. United States v. Ash