Garrett v. State’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

12 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 12 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “The application of Brady to the present case is clear, and we, therefore, reverse the Court of Special Appeals’s judgment with respect to Garrett’s two convictions of attempted first-degree murder because those convictions should have been reviewed under a plain error analysis rather than affirmed under the legal theory of concurrent intent, a theory that was interjected for the first time on appeal. By utilizing plain error analysis, the panel in the present case should have reversed Garrett’s convictions of attempted first-degree murder after the jury had been instructed on transferred intent, for as we stated in Brady , “[a]s articulated in Poe , if a defendant intends to kill a specific victim and instead wounds an unintended victim without killing either, the defendant can be convicted only of the attempted murder of the intended victim and transferred intent does not apply.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Pettigrew v. State

2. “[W]e do not reverse the Court of Special Appeals for the exercise of its discretion unless it has clearly been abused. While this Court retains its own independent discretion to hear unpreserved arguments, that does not mean we review the discretionary functions of the lower appellate court de novo. To the contrary, we respect the judgment of the Court of Special Appeals in determining whether it needed to consider the issue for the proper execution of justice, and unless upon our review that court abused its discretion under the Rule, we will not substitute our judgment for theirs.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Yates v. State

3. “There is no fixed formula for the determination of when discretion should be exercised, and there are no bright line rules to conclude that discretion has been abused.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 235 Md. App. 540 - Winston, Mayhew & Cannon v. State