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 authority that ultimately merged following Davis v. State, 351 Ark. 406, 94 S.W.3d 892 (2003). One line germinated following a concurrence by Justice Fogleman, who expressed dismay over the then-existing lack of any discernible standard of review for suppression cases. Vault v. State, 256 Ark. 343, 345–48, 507 S.W.2d 111 (1974). After summarizing the prevailing language on appellate review, he lamented: "I now confess I do not know what this means." Id. at 345.

Justice Fogleman's plea for a new standard was promptly answered in Degler v. State, 257 Ark. 388, 517 S.W. 2d 515 (1974), wherein the Court unveiled the "clearly against the preponderance of the evidence test." This formulation was derived from a review standard that had been employed for chancery court appeals and was apparently viewed as a close cousin to the "clearly erroneous" standard that the United States Supreme Court had championed in United States v. U.S. Gypsum Co., 333 U.S. 364 (1948). This language, and alternative forms of it, see, e.g., Cook v. State, 293 Ark 103, 105, 732 S.W.2d 462 (1987); Findley v. State, 300 Ark 265, 269, 778 S.W.2d 624 (1989) ("if we find the evidence to preponderate against the findings of the trial court, then it is our duty to reverse."), periodically crop up in subsequent decisions leading into the twentieth century. See, e.g., Laime v. State, 347 Ark. 142, 153, 60 S.W.3d 464 (2001).

But by 2003, we found it necessary in the wake of Ornelas v. United States, 517 U.S. 690 (1996), to develop the second line of authority for reviewing suppression cases. Thus, in Davis v. State, 351 Ark. 406, 94 S.W.2d 892 (2003), we jettisoned other language that had