Wright v. United States’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

54 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 54 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““The essence of [discretionary] decision-making is the trial court’s judgment in exercising that discretion,” (James) Johnson v. United States, 398 A.2d 354, 361 (D.C.1979), for a discretionary decision is based not only on hard facts but also — and often more importantly — on perceptions of demeanor[,] or the pace of the trial, and, ultimately, of the probable impact of counsel and witnesses on the jury. The parties, therefore, are entitled to have the trial judge exercise that discretion, unfettered by erroneous legal thinking (citation omitted); they need not settle for the substituted judgment of an appellate court that would sustain the ruling on a plausible, alternative ground without benefit of all the data, derived from perceptions at trial, that inherently go into a discretionary ruling. (Citation omitted.) Were an appellate court to substitute its own judgment, the court would rationalize a result which the trial court itself, properly informed of the law, might not have reached, given factors at trial which the appellate court could not possibly perceive.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Randolph v. United States

2. “does not `inevitably' lead to only one acceptable result.”

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