People v. Sheppard’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

15 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 15 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “Because the testing of a breath sample by the defendant would probably simply confirm the results of the state’s intoxi-lyzer test, and because the defendant could have demonstrated any lack of reliability of that test by a number of other means, the [Trombetta ] court concluded that “the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment does not require that law enforcement agencies preserve breath samples in order to introduce breath-analysis tests at trial.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. People v. Humes

2. “It is not necessary for a defendant to demonstrate that the evidence he seeks to discover, but which is no longer available for examination by the court, would have been favorable to him ... so long as that evidence is not merely "incidental" to the prosecution's case or to the defendant's affirmative defense.... It is sufficient that the material "`might' be `favorable' to the accused."”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. People v. Pope

3. “While trial courts retain discretion in fashioning an appropriate remedy for an accused prejudiced by governmental loss or destruction of exculpatory and material evidence, the sanction imposed, at least in the absence of egregious governmental misconduct, should be no more restrictive than is necessary to protect the defendant’s constitutional rights.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. People v. Collins