United States v. Brawner’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

158 federal appellate · 16 district · 100 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 303 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “Neither logic nor justice can tolerate a jurisprudence that defines the elements of an offense as requiring a mental state such that one defendant can properly argue that his voluntary drunkenness removed his capacity to form the specific intent but another defendant is inhibited from a submission of his contention that an abnormal mental condition, for which he was in no way responsible, negated his capacity to form a particular specific intent, even though the condition did not exonerate him from all criminal responsibility.”

   37 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. United States v. Moore · United States v. Greene

2. “A person is not responsible for criminal conduct if at the time of such conduct as a result of mental disease or defect he lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality [wrongfulness] of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of law.”

   6 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. State v. Ellis · Government of the Virgin Islands v. Fredericks

3. ““The doctrine of criminal responsibility is such that there can be no doubt ‘of the complicated nature of the decision to be made — intertwining moral, legal, and medical judgments,’ . . . [J]ury decisions have been accorded unusual deference even when they have found responsibility in the face of a powerful record, with medical evidence uncontradicted, pointing toward exculpation. The ‘moral’ elements of the decision are not defined exclusively by religious considerations but by the totality of underlying conceptions of ethics and justice shared by the community, as expressed by its jury surrogate. The essential feature of a jury ‘lies in the interposition between the accused and his accuser of the commonsense judgment of a group of laymen, and in the community participation and shared responsibility that results from that group’s determination of guilt or innocence.’ . “The expert witnesses — psychiatrists and psychologists — are called to adduce relevant information concerning what may for convenience be referred to as the ‘medical’ component of the responsibility issue. But the difficulty ... is that the medical expert comes, by testimony [in terms of the statutory test] to express conclusions that in essence embody ethical and legal conclusions.” (153 U.S.App.D.C. at pp. 14 — 15,471 F.2d at pp. 982-983)”

   5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. State v. Foster · State v. Dorsey