Thurman v. State’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

4 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 4 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “[T]he Georgia Supreme Court [has] ruled that where a defendant is charged both with possession of a firearm by a convicted felon and with a more serious offense which is unrelated in the sense that proof of the former is not required to prove the latter, the trial must be bifurcated to prevent evidence of the defendant's prior felony conviction from influencing the jury unnecessarily. On the other hand, as the [Supreme Court has further] explained, in cases where the count charging possession of a firearm by a convicted felon might be material to a more serious charge-as, for example, where the offense of murder and possession are charged in one indictment, and the possession charge might conceivably become the underlying felony to support a felony murder conviction on the malice murder count of the indictment-the trial need not be bifurcated.”

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