State v. Childers’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

9 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 9 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “Voluntary manslaughter, by definition, requires a criminal intent to do harm to another. But according to the defendant’s story, he had no criminal intent whatsoever. If, as he suggests, the defendant returned fire in a panic for his life, surely the defense of self-defense would be appropriate. Notably, this was charged by the trial court.... Without any evidence supporting the view that the defendant fired the fatal shots while under an “uncontrollable impulse to do violence,” the trial court properly declined to charge the law of voluntary manslaughter to the jury-”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
   e.g. State v. Niles