Beecher v. Alabama’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

103 federal appellate · 24 district · 298 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 536 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “By June 22, the petitioner’s right leg, which was later amputated, had become so swollen and his wound so painful that he required an injection of morphine every four hours. Less than an hour after one of these injections, two Alabama investigators visited him in the prison hospital.... In the course of a 90-minute ‘conversation,’ the investigators prepared two detailed statements similar to the confession the petitioner had given five days earlier at gunpoint in Tennessee. Still in a ‘kind of slumber’ from his last morphine injection, feverish, and in intense pain, the petitioner signed the written confessions thus prepared for him.”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. 380 F. Supp. 2d 915 - United States v. Mayhew · Colorado v. Connelly

2. “is of course vitally relevant to the voluntariness of petitioner's later statements”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Oregon v. Elstad · Medeiros v. Shimoda

3. “'COMES TOO LATE' . . . IS CLEARLY untenable. . . . [s]ince the state court deemed the federal constitutional question to be before it, we could not treat the decision below as resting upon an adequate and independent state ground even if we were to conclude that the state court might properly have relied upon such a ground to avoid deciding the federal question.”

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