Adams v. Hanson’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

2 federal appellate · 1 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 19 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “A prosecutor’s administrative duties and those investigatory functions that do not relate to an advocate’s preparation for the initiation of a prosecution or for judicial proceedings are not entitled to absolute immunity. We have not retreated, however, from the principle that acts undertaken by a prosecutor in preparing for the initiation of judicial proceedings or for trial, and which occur in the course of his role as an advocate for the State, are entitled to the protections of absolute immunity. Those acts must include the professional evaluation of the evidence assembled by the police and appropriate preparation for its presentation at trial or before a grand jury after a decision to seek an indictment has been made. * * * There is a difference between the advocate’s role in evaluating evidence and interviewing witnesses as he prepares for trial, on the one hand, and the detective’s role in searching for the clues and corroboration that might give him probable cause to recommend that a suspect be arrested, on the other hand. When a prosecutor performs the investigative functions normally performed by a detective or police officer, it is “neither appropriate nor justifiable that, for the same act, immunity should protect the one and not the other.” Thus, if a prosecutor plans and executes a raid on a suspected weapons cache, he “has no greater claim to complete immunity than activities of police officers allegedly acting under his direction.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. 6 F. Supp. 3d 730 - Buchanan v. Metz

2. “The probable-cause standard may be inapplicable, however, because '[t]he typical arrest warrant is based on probable cause that the arrestee has committed a crime,' which is not the standard for the issuance of material-witness warrants.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. Singleton v. Cannizzaro

3. “If material witness warrants do not qualify as 'Warrants' under the Fourth Amendment, then material witness arrests might still be governed by the Fourth Amendment's separate reasonableness requirement for seizures of the person.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. Singleton v. Cannizzaro