Jordan v. State’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

3 federal appellate · 38 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 42 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “In Jordan , we discussed Code of Criminal Procedure Article 42.12, § 15 's finality requirement in prior criminal convictions. There, we held that a prior felony conviction must be final to enhance the punishment in a subsequent prosecution. While the statute did not expressly require finality, we found a finality requirement in § 15 because without it, trial judges would have to predict an appellate court's decision in a pending case or risk judgments being overturned for events that occur while the case is pending. To reach this holding, we defined "final" in a manner consistent with the general principle that a conviction with a pending appeal is not final until the appellate court affirms the conviction and issues its mandate. Applying this principle, we explained that a pending appeal on a conviction must be resolved for a probated sentence to be a final conviction for enhancement purposes. When there is no pending appeal from the conviction, but there is an appeal only from a probation revocation, the conviction can be used as an enhancement. A deferred adjudication, however, becomes final only when guilt is adjudicated. We, therefore, held Jordan's community-supervision revocation was not final and could not be used to deny him community supervision in a subsequent prosecution. However, this logic does not apply to civil-commitment order violations simply because the statute requires an "adjudication," not a "conviction."”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Bohannan v. State