State v. Smith’s Empirical Analysis
1984
Citation profile
24 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 24 later decisions — most recently March 2007
24 state decisions — followed in 20 states
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 Delaware v. Prouse · United States v. Brignoni-Ponce · United States v. Martinez-Fuerte · Almeida-Sanchez v. United States · United States v. Ortiz
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 24 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““while commendable in their ultimate goal of removing [drunk-driving] offenders from the public highways, draw dangerously close to what may be referred to as a police state. Here, the state agencies have ignored the presumption of innocence, assuming that criminal conduct must be occurring on the roads and highways, and have taken an ‘end justifies the means’ approach. The Court is not so naive to think that criminal conduct does not occur regularly in the form of [drunk-driving] offenders. Yet, a basic tenet of American jurisprudence is that the government cannot assume criminal conduct in effectuating a stop such as the one presented herein. Were the authorities allowed to maintain such activities as presented in this case, the next logical step would be to allow similar stops for searching out other types of criminal offenders. For example, it is well known to the public that shoplifting is an everyday occurrence .... Are law enforcement authorities then to be allowed to establish fixed checkpoints, permanent or otherwise, outside of every shopping center in the area to question all exiting shoppers as to whether they possess sales receipts? Are law enforcement authorities to be allowed to demand all shoppers to produce such receipts or be subject to arrest everytime they go shopping? The potential for abuse is apparent.””
4 later decisions quote this exact passage“The United States Supreme Court has never stretched its permanent roadblock exception to the point that such an intrusion can be tolerated under the Fourth Amendment. The subjective intrusion, i.e. fear and apprehension, potentially imposed upon the individual innocent of misconduct is simply too great.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage
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.