84 Md. App. 353 - Leak v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1990
Citation profile
19 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 19 later decisions — most recently July 2010
19 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 Wilhelm v. State · Ross v. State · A. S. Abell Co. v. Sweeney · Madison v. State · Brown v. State
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 19 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Even in the absence of any indication as to intonation, facial expression, or “body language,” it is apparent to us from the nature of the questions that the interrogation was not for the purpose of sharpening the issue or bringing out the full facts of the case being tried. We cannot escape the conclusion that the purpose of the interrogation was to impeach the witness. The questions themselves could not fail to convey to the jury the judge’s opinion of the witness’s credibility. That is not the proper role of a trial judge, who must maintain the appearance of an impartial arbitrator.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“The extent to which a trial judge should or may intervene to question a witness ... involves the drawing of a fíne line between assisting the jury by bringing out facts and “sharpening the issues,” which is permissible, and influencing the jury’s assessment of facts or of a witness’s credibility by indicating his own opinions, which is not permissible.”
1 later decision 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.