McKinley v. State’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

7 federal appellate · 28 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 35 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “"In situations such as we have here, where a confession is made within an hour and one-half or an hour and 40 minutes after the police have taken the accused into the morgue to view the body of the deceased, the issue of the voluntariness of a confession should not be permitted to turn on a finding of the trial judge that such morgue viewing had no psychological effect in inducing the questioned confession. Rather, we deem that where the confession follows the morgue viewing as closely in time as occurred here it should be held as a matter of law that the confession is the result of such psychological pressure as to render the same involuntary."”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. Castleberry v. State · 40 Wis. 2d 536 - State v. Harrell

2. ““If our society is so civilized as to demand that a suspect be warned of his constitutional rights before questioning, and to extend to a suspect the right to remain silent and to have an attorney present, it must eschew the barbarism of ‘corpse identification’ during the process of interrogation.””

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. 75 Wis. 2d 344 - Johnson v. State · 59 Wis. 2d 66 - State v. Wallace

3. “'[S]ome constitutional rights [are] so basic to a fair trial that their infraction can never be treated as harmless error.'”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 142 Wis. 2d 821 - State v. Thompson