United States v. Button’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

24 federal appellate · 1 district · 3 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 43 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “The present tense is supported in the air; it has no point of reference. It speaks, after all, of the time when an anonymous informant conveyed information to the officer, which could have been a day, a week, or months before the date of the affidavit. To make a double inference, that the undated information speaks as of a date close to that of the affidavit and that therefore the undated observation made on the strength of such information must speak of an even more recent date would be to open the door to the unsupervised issuance of search warrants on the basis of aging information. Officers with information of questionable recency could escape embarrassment by simply omitting averments as to time, so long as they reported that whatever information they received was stated to be current at that time. Magistrates would have less opportunity to perform their “natural and detached” function. Indeed, if the affidavit in this case be adjudged valid, it is difficult to see how any function but that of a rubber stamp remains for them.”

   3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. United States v. Kennedy · United States v. Musick

2. “Although there can be no precise rule as to how much time may intervene between the obtaining of the facts and the issuance of the search warrant, in dealing with a substance like marihuana, which can be easily concealed and moved about, probable cause to believe that it was in a certain building on the third of the month is not probable cause to believe that it will be in the same building eight days later.”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. United States v. Jeanetta · United States v. Ward

3. “Aguilar was concerned with the ultimate trustworthiness of hearsay information. All hearsay was not to be rejected out of hand; neither was all hearsay to be uncritically accepted; some guidelines had to be devised to separate the wheat from the chaff. Aguilar sought first to ascertain the actual source of the incriminating information. The “basis of knowledge” prong was designed to locate that source and to examine the validity of his conclusion. It was not concerned with the integrity of the informant (that test would come later via the other prong) but only with his ratiocinative process-not with the honesty of his narration but with the nature of his perception: (How did he reash [sic] his conclusion? Did he see something or hear something firsthand or did he merely pass on a story or rumor from someone else? Or did he simply jump to a wrong conclusion on the basis of inadequate or ambiguous observations?) The simple thrust of the “basis of knowledge” prong was that the informant must not pass on his conclusion, let alone the conclusion of someone else, but must furnish the raw data of his senses, so that the reviewing judge could drawn [sic] his own conclusion from that data. Once having located the original source— the person who saw, heard or smelled something firsthand — then and only then did Aguilar look to the “veracity” of that source. As a substitute for the classic trustworthiness device of the oath, it sought some alternative guarantee that the declarant spoke ”

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