Hill v. Al Lockhart’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

43 federal appellate · 2 district · 6 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 76 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “The defense of “diminished responsibility” or “partial responsibility” doctrine permits a defendant to introduce evidence of a mental disease or defect to prove the absence of a particular mental element of the crime.... Unlike the doctrine of not guilty by reason of insanity which provides a defendant is not criminally responsible for his conduct “if, at the time of such conduct, as a result of mental disease or defect he was incapable of knowing and appreciating the nature, quality, or wrongfulness of his conduct,” § 552.030.1, RSMo 1994, under the diminished capacity doctrine, the defendant accepts criminal responsibility for his conduct but seeks conviction of a lesser degree of the crime because the mental disease or defect prevented the defendant from forming the mental element of the higher degree of the crime. “A defense of diminished capacity because the accused is incapable of forming the mental element necessary to commit a crime is necessarily based on evidence of a mental disease or defect as defined in § 552.010.” Mental disease or defect is defined in § 552.010, RSMo 1994, as including “congenital and traumatic mental conditions as well as disease.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Honeycutt v. Roper

2. “Significantly, the legal analysis to be applied by this court to Mr. Hill’s claim, ie., ineffective assistance of counsel related to failure to present evidence of an extensive history of mental illness is the same regardless of which of the discrete aspects of the state court trial is at issue—the guilt phase or the penalty phase. The question of mental condition, moreover, cannot neatly be divided into sanity at the time of the offense as the relevant issue at the guilt phase, and mitigating evidence as the relevant issue at sentencing. [A criminal defendant’s] intellectual understanding of his actions and their gravity [is] clearly in issue at both phases of the proceedings.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Schneider v. Delo

3. ““[A]ny deficiencies in counsel’s performance must be prejudicial to the defense in order to constitute ineffective assistance under the Constitution. The defendant must [therefore] show that there is a reasonable probability that, but for counsel’s unprofessional errors, the result of the proceeding would have been different. A reasonable probability is a probability sufficient to undermine confidence in the outcome. When a defendant challenges a conviction, the question is whether there is a reasonable probability that, absent the errors, the factfinder would have had a reasonable doubt respecting guilt.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Freeman v. Class