113 Md. App. 322 - Jeffries v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1997
Citation profile
43 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 43 later decisions — most recently August 2022 · most notably Klauenberg v. State (1999), 128 Md. App. 79 - Fisher v. State (1999)
43 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 Miranda v. State of Arizona Vignera · Batson v. Kentucky · Hernandez v. New York · Purkett v. Elem · Riddick 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 43 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The failure we so often see when the “plain error” exemption is invoked is the failure to realize the chasm of difference between due process and gratuitous process and the different mind sets that reviewing judges, in the exercise of their discretion, in all likelihood bring to bear on those two very different phenomena. We tried to explain this difference in Jeffries v. State, 113 Md.App. 322, 325-26 , 688 A.2d 16 (1997). When due process demands, the law will reverse the conviction of an undisputed and cold-blooded killer even on a technicality, because it must. A critical component of that principle, however, is the qualifying clause “because it must.” It is not with any sense of satisfaction that a court reverses on a technicality. When it does so, it does so reluctantly and with heavy heart, and only because it must. The philosophical converse is that when the procedural posture of an issue makes a reversal on a technicality a consequence that is not compelled but only gratuitously permitted, a court is frequently not motivated to be thus gratuitous. There is a vast philosophical, as well as legal, distinction between due process and gratuitous process. There are procedural requirements that must be satisfied before process literally becomes due. For a reviewing court to overlook a precondition for review or to interpret loosely a procedural requirement, on the other hand, is an indulgence in favor of a defendant that is purely gratuitous. Even those who are indisputabl”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage“The appellant ... was not convicted of, let alone charged with, a non-existent crime. He has badly misidentified the crime in issue. He was neither charged with nor convicted of some crime known as carjacking-murder. There is no such crime. The appellant was charged with and convicted of the crime of murder. Murder, of course, was not only in existence as a crime on September 9,1994, the day on which the appellant murdered Daniel Huston; it has been in existence as long as the Anglo-American common law itself.... That is the charging document in question and there is no mention of “carjacking” therein. Murder was “the crime” with which the appellant was charged and of which he was convicted____ Even so basic a division of murder as that which split it into two degrees for punishment purposes, ch. 138 of the Acts of 1809, did not turn murder into two separate crimes. The crime, regardless of degree, remained simply murder. A fortiori, even lesser distinctions among the various theories, rationales, or mentes reae that may support a conviction for either second-degree or first-degree murder do not create separate crimes. The crime is still murder whether based, for instance, on a finding of an intent to commit grievous bodily harm or on a finding of a depraved heart..... Within the more particularized realm of statutory felony-murder, the even more parochial distinctions among fifteen separate felonies and fifteen respective attempts (Art. 27, §§ 408, 409, 410) do not create th”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“A unanimous verdict of guilty of first-degree felony-murder would not be overturned even if it could be conclusively determined that six of the jurors stopped their analysis after concluding that the murder in question occurred in the course of an in-house robbery, five others analyzed it only in terms of a murder in the course of a burglary, and one lone juror (not sure that the victim had any money) reached the conclusion that the murder occurred in the course of an attempted robbery. The unanimous verdict would have been guilty of the single crime of felony-murder, and not three fragmented decisions with respect to three separate crimes of robbery-murder, burglary-murder, and attempted-robbery-murder.”
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.