Cornell v. State’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

8 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 8 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““The State’s expert testified that the murder weapon was a revolver from which spent cartridges must be ejected manually. The State argued at trial that Cornell showed malice by taking the time to manually eject the spent cartridge and leave it at the victim’s feet after shooting him. Cornell claims that this scenario was not possible because he used a semi-automatic pistol that ejected spent cartridges automatically. “Trial counsel was not deficient in choosing to cross-examine the State’s expert on this issue rather than calling her own expert. Trial counsel’s ‘decision to avoid the battle of the experts and rely upon cross-examination of the State’s experts’ is an acceptable tactic if not ‘patently unreasonable.’ Counsel’s decision in this trial was not patently unreasonable.””

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