State v. Powell’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

19 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 19 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “... [T]he concern here is with plain view ... as descriptive of a situation in which there has been no search at all in the Fourth Amendment sense. This situation, which perhaps is deserving of a different label so as to avoid confusion of it with that discussed in Coolidge , encompasses those circumstances in which an observation is made by a police officer without a prior physical intrusion into a constitutionally protected area. This includes the case in which an officer discovers an object which has been left in an "open field" or similar nonprotected area, and also those cases in which an officer — again, without making a prior physical intrusion — sees an object on the person of an individual, within premises, or within a vehicle. In each of these instances there has been no search at all because of the plain view character of the situation, and this means that the observation is lawful without the necessity of establishing either pre-existing probable cause or the existence of a search warrant or one of the traditional exceptions to the warrant requirement. It is extremely important to understand that the kind of plain view described in the preceding paragraph, because it involves no intrusion covered by the Fourth Amendment, need not meet the three requirements set out in the Coolidge plurality opinion.... . [T]he observation need not have been inadvertent. As Judge Moylan has pointed out, in such a case the condition of inadvertence is certainly not operational. In s”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. State v. Bolton · 218 N.J. Super. 210 - State v. Foley

2. “a prior justification for an intrusion in the course of which * * * [the police officer] came inadvertently across a piece of evidence incriminating the accused”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. State v. Bolton

3. “[t]he deputy did not crane his neck, lean into the truck or do anything unusual to see the plastic bag.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. State v. Bolton