Commonwealth v. Manning’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. “What is relevant in moving a particular defendant’s admission to ARD is whether he is the type of person who can benefit from the treatment offered by an ARD program____ This judgment, in turn, rests in the sound discretion of the district attorney. Such discretion, of course, is not without limitation, and, as is indicated by Professor Davis in Discretionary Justice, may be usefully circumscribed by a requirement of openness: ... In all of the cases consolidated herein, the prosecutors have openly specified their reasons for not submitting the cases for ARD, and those reasons, while they may be subject to disagreement as to their wisdom, do not amount to an abuse of discretion. Since the judgment about who can benefit from ARD is subjective, and since society may be seriously damaged by a wrong judgment, the district attorney is not to be faulted if he errs on the side of caution____ [T]he decision to submit the case for ARD rests in the sound discretion of the district attorney, and absent an abuse of that discretion involving some criteria for admission to ARD wholly, patently and without doubt unrelated to the protection of society and/or the likelihood of a person’s success in rehabilitation, such as race, religion or other such obviously prohibited considerations, the attorney for the Commonwealth must be free to submit a case or not submit it for ARD consideration based on his view of what is most beneficial for society and the offender.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 369 Pa. Super. 318 - Commonwealth v. Ebert