5 Md. App. 132 - Edmonds v. State’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

12 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 12 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““It has been generally recognized that where, as here, the only evidence of guilt of accused persons consists of their fingerprints found at the scene of the crime, the evidence, to be legally sufficient to sustain a conviction, must be coupled with evidence of other circumstances tending to reasonably exclude the hypothesis that the prints were impressed at a time other than that of the crime. [Citations omitted.] Such “other circumstances” need not be those completely independent of the fingerprint and may properly include circumstances such as the location of the print, the character of the place or premises where it was found and the accessibility of the general public to the object on which the print was impressed.””

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. People v. Ray · People v. Clark

2. “[s]ince fingerprinting is used in numerous branches of business and civil and military service, ... the fact of fingerprinting cannot, of itself, be deemed a badge of crime or connote the existence of a criminal record, nor would the introduction of such evidence for the limited purpose of comparison with latent fingerprints of an accused found at a crime scene per se constitute prejudice or deny the accused his constitutional right to a fair trial.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. 232 Md. App. 125 - Howard v. State