Commonwealth v. Huynh’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

2 district · 3 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 5 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “[T]he defendant argues that the videotapes of the fight outside the club demonstrate definitively that the defendant did not shoot Huan: the defendant was shown not to have a gun in his hand, and there was no evidence of muzzle flash in any of the frames when Huan allegedly was shot. See Commonwealth v. Vaughn, 23 Mass.App.Ct. 40, 42-43 , 498 N.E.2d 1072 (1986) (despite eyewitness testimony, photographic evidence shows defendant could not have been perpetrator). The videotape images were blurry, of poor quality, and required an interpretation by the defendant’s investigator. The reliability of the investigator’s work, and whether he accurately identified persons shown in the videotape, which was based in part on out-of-court witness statements, was a question for the jury to resolve. The jury were not required to accept his testimony, and in any event, they had the videotape and photographic evidence to review in their deliberations and could judge for themselves what was seen on the videotape. Where the defendant’s case depended on the credibility of his witnesses, it did not definitively establish the defendant’s innocence .... The defendant’s claim that Dung Kieu and Thinh Dao gave false testimony rests on a wholesale acceptance of his investigator’s affidavit as definitively establishing the premise that the defendant did not shoot the victims. As discussed above, this was based on the investigator’s reliance on selected por tions of the testimony, selected portions of th”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 769 F. Supp. 2d 30 - Nhut Huynh v. Roden

2. “[T]he defendant fled, nearly causing an accident, and he left three young friends, including his girl friend, behind with no means of returning to Connecticut. The defendant had a motive to injure Tuan, whom he thought purposely bumped into him the week before, and he tried to provoke a fight with Tuan immediately before the shooting. The defendant kept reaching into his coat during the argument, as if readying to pull out a gun. We are satisfied that the jury’s verdicts are not a miscarriage of justice.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. 769 F. Supp. 2d 30 - Nhut Huynh v. Roden