71 Md. App. 165 - Smith v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1987
Citation profile
8 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 8 later decisions — most recently June 2010
8 state decisions
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 Faretta v. California · Illinois v. Allen · Weatherford v. Bursey · Kirchberg v. Feenstra · United States v. Dougherty
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 8 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The rule is clear. Whether evidence of prior sexual contact will be admitted to explain, inter alia, the presence of semen requires the trial court to determine whether the probative value of the evidence of the victim’s prior sexual contact substantially outweighs the danger of undue prejudice. In order to establish the relevance and materiality required by the Rape Shield Statute, the offer of proof must be specific as to when the sexual contact took place and a proper medical foundation must be made to establish, scientifically, the probative value of the testimony. We caution, however, that even where that proof is offered, ultimate admissibility rests within the sound discretion of the trial judge. Here, the probative value of the victim’s prior sexual conduct is minimal in light of Smith’s failure to proffer any specific facts tending to show that the acid phosphatase [a male sexual fluid] was not his. * * * * To allow the defense to engage in a “fishing expedition” or to admit such evidence without a foundation to show its relevance would be contrary to the intent of the statute. Because the “source of the semen” may be at issue in every rape case, the admissibility of recent sexual activities of the victim is limited to cases in which the relevance of the evidence is shown by laying a proper foundation. In the case sub judice, this could have been done by proffering that the victim had sexual intercourse at a reasonably specific time before the incident with a person ”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
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.