Michigan Supreme Court· 2/16/1988

People v. Allen

Citations

420 N.W.2d 499
429 Mich. 558

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

“[P]rior convictions for non-theft crimes which do not contain elements of dishonesty or false statement should never be admitted into evidence.”
“[C]rimes having an element of dishonesty or false statement are directly probative of a witness' truthfulness . . . .”
“The danger then is that a jury will misuse prior conviction evidence -5- by focusing on the defendant’s general bad character, rather than solely on his character for truthtelling.”
“[I]n our system of jurisprudence, we try cases, rather than persons.” (citation omitted)
“Since we find that as a matter of law prior convictions of crimes involving dishonesty or false statement are more probative than prejudicial, it obviously cannot be argued that the probative value is ‘substantially outweighed’ by prejudice.”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).

Judges: Levin, Cavanagh, Archer, Brickley, Riley, Boyle, Griffin

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Cited by

76 cases in this archive cite this case; the 20 most cited are listed.

Cites

106 cases in this archive are cited by this case; the 20 most cited are listed.

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