Miller v. State’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

27 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 27 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “As the Court frequently has remarked, probable cause is a flexible, commonsense standard. It merely requires that the facts available to the officer would “warrant a man of reasonable caution in the belief,” Carroll v. United States, 267 U.S. 132, 162 , 45 S.Ct. 280, 288 , 69 L.Ed. 543 (1925), that certain items may be contraband or stolen property or useful as evidence of a crime; it does not demand any showing that such a belief be correct or more likely true than false. A “practical, non-technical” probability that incriminating evidence is involved is all that is required. Brinegar v. United States.... Moreover, our observation in United States v. Cortez, 449 U.S. 411 [ 101 S.Ct. 690 , 66 L.Ed.2d 621 ] ... (1981), regarding “particularized suspicion,” is equally applicable to the probable cause requirement: 1 The process does not deal with hard certainties, but with probabilities. Long before the law of probabilities was articulated as such, practical people formulated certain common-sense conclusions about human behavior; jurors as factfinders are permitted to do the same — and so are law enforcement officers. Finally, the evidence thus collected must be seen and weighed not in terms of library analysis by scholars, but as understood by those versed in the field of law enforcement.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Cote v. State