State v. Bernard’s Empirical Analysis
1993
Citation profile
218 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 218 later decisions — most recently March 2022 · most notably State v. Chaney (1998), State v. Harris (1994)
218 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 Energy Cooperative, Inc. v. Phillips Petroleum Co. · Northern Securities Company v. United States · Innkeepers of New Castle, Inc. v. Maley · People v. . Molineux · State v. Reese
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 218 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“In prosecutions under chapter 566 or 568 involving a victim under fourteen years of age, whether or not age is an element of the crime for which the defendant is on trial, evidence that the defendant has committed other charged or uncharged crimes involving victims under fourteen years of age shall be admissible for the purpose of showing the propensity of the defendant to commit the crime or crimes with which he is charged, provided that such evidence involves acts that occurred within ten years before or after the act or acts for which the defendant is being tried.”
27 later decisions quote this exact passage““What Bernard attempted to make clear was that where the uncharged offenses or conduct involved different victims at a different and unrelated time and place, the traditional common scheme or plan exception would not apply. However, the Court in Bernard went on to recognize a related exception known as the ‘signature modus operandi /corroboration exception.’ That exception, similar to the identity exception, authorized evidence of an uncharged crime if the offenses are nearly identical and their methodology so unusual and distinctive that they amount to a signature of the defendant involved in both crimes.””
6 later decisions quote this exact passage“[fjor corroboration evidence to be of sufficiently increased probative value so as to outweigh its prejudicial effect, the evidence must be more than merely similar in nature to the sexual assault for which the defendant is charged. Evidence of prior sexual misconduct that corroborates the testimony of the victim should be nearly identical to the charged crime and so unusual and distinctive as to be a signature of the defendant’s mo-dus operandi. This is a threshold requirement that must be met before the trial court can proceed to weigh any additional factors in determining the question of admissibility.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Coleman · State v. Nichols
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.