Contreras v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1986
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 44 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 49 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently January 2019 · most notably Rock v. Arkansas (1987), State v. Johnston (1988)
2 federal appellate · 44 state decisions — followed in 12 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 Ohio v. Roberts · Dutton v. Evans · Frye v. United States · Washington v. Washington State Commercial Passenger Fishing Vessel Ass'n · Cincinnati Milacron Chemicals, Inc. v. Blankenship
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 49 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Just when a scientific principle or discovery crosses the line between the experimental and demonstrable stages is difficult to define. Somewhere in this twilight zone the evidential force of the principle must be recognized, and while courts will go a long way in admitting expert testimony deduced from a well-recognized scientific principle or discovery, the thing from which the deduction is made must be sufficiently established to have gained general acceptance in the particular field in which it belongs.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. Harmon v. State · Zani v. State“Applying Frye is a two-step process: first, the relevant scientific community must be defined, and second, the testimony and publications of the relevant experts in the field must be evaluated to determine if there is general consensus that [the scientific analysis] is reliable.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage““(1) [T]he standard is judicially manageable; (2) the standard saves judicial time and resources; (3) the standard assures that juries will not be misled by unproven, unsound ‘scientific’ procedures, thus safeguarding the court’s truth-finding role; and (4) the standard assures fairness and uniformity of decision-making.””
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.