6 Va. App. 384 - Taylor v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1988
Citation profile
38 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 42 later decisions — most recently November 2014 · most notably 8 Va. App. 532 - Limonja v. Commonwealth (1989), 7 Va. App. 93 - Iglesias v. Commonwealth (1988)
38 state decisions
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.
Relationships
Relies on Carroll v. United States · Florida v. Royer · United States v. Mendenhall · United States v. Cortez · Delaware v. Prouse
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 42 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“It is a convenient descriptive term without a great deal of legal significance. Some lament the fact that the Supreme Court has not yet told us whether meeting the so-called “drug courier profile” is an adequate predicate to establish either articulable suspicion for a stop or probable cause for an arrest or search. Of course, the Supreme Court has not told us that and they never will. Indeed, they cannot, for there is no such thing as a single drug courier profile; there are infinite drug courier profiles. The very notion is protean, not monolithic. United States v. Mendenhall, refers to it as “an informally compiled abstract of characteristics thought typical of persons carrying illicit drugs.” It is simply an open-ended laundry list of more or less suspicious circumstances, some of which may occur in a particular case.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent“First, the assessment must be based upon all of the circumstances. The analysis proceeds with various objective observations, information from police reports, if such are available, and consideration of the modes or patterns of operation of certain kinds of lawbreakers. From these data, a trained officer draws inferences and makes deductions inferences and deductions that might well elude an untrained person. * * * * * * The second element contained in the idea that an assessment of the whole picture must yield a particularized suspicion is the concept that the process just described must raise a suspicion that the particular individual being stopped is engaged in wrongdoing.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
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.