572 So. 2d 895 - Downs v. State’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

2 federal appellate · 31 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 33 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “Downs introduced character evidence to show that when he was a child, his father drank, beat his mother and the children, and then abandoned the family, leaving Downs, the eldest child, to help care for everyone his father left behind. At sixteen, Downs joined the army. The army discovered that he enlisted while under age, so it relegated Downs to kitchen-type duties. Downs then went AWOL, but eventually was honorably discharged. While AWOL, Downs returned to his family in Kansas, where he committed an attempted robbery and a robbery using a toy gun. He was put on probation, but he was sent to prison for violating probation because he left the foster home where he was living and returned to his mother and grandmother. In prison, Downs earned a high school graduate equivalency diploma and learned some construction skills. After his release in 1970, Downs went to the Jacksonville area where he married his first wife, had a daughter, and worked hard to provide for his family, even after divorcing his first wife. While in prison he helped his daughter to deal with her emotional problems, and he has remained friends with her mother. Several of Downs's former employers and business partners testified that they liked and trusted Downs, and that they would rehire him if he was released from prison. Richard Dugger, Secretary of the Department of Corrections, provided mitigating testimony, which the trial court sealed. A forensic psychologist, Dr. Harry Krop, testified that Downs was i”

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

2. “Downs’s defense at the resentencing proceeding focused on establishing that he was not the triggerman and did not deserve the death penalty. Dovras testified that Johnson drove him to the dirt road and dropped him off. Downs said he had changed his mind about participating in the murder, so he left the scene and went to the home of his grandmother, Bobbie Jo Michael. When Johnson found Downs at Michael’s house later that night, Johnson was carrying Harris’s driver’s licence and money he took from the body. The next day, he and Johnson visited Bar-field who paid Johnson $500 in partial payment for the murder. • Downs offered the testimony of various witnesses to support his theory of penalty defense that Johnson — not Downs— was the triggerman. Barfield testified that on the day after Harris died, Johnson presented Harris’s driver’s licence as proof of the killing, and Johnson admitted at that time that he was the one who killed Harris. However, Barfield conceded that in his own trial in 1978, he testified that he had no knowledge of Harris’s murder. Downs’s sister,. Darlene Shafer [Perry], also testified that Johnson told her he had killed Harris.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Downs v. Secretary, Florida Department of Corrections

3. “of imposing the death penalty. Id. In the instant case, Hightower was clearly uncomfortable with the question of whether she could impose the death penalty in Sims' case. The trial court did not abuse its discretion and we find no error. Sims next argues that the court should have considered and instructed the jury on his claim of imperfect self-defense as a mitigating circumstance. We disagree. The jury heard and rejected Sims' claim of self-defense during the guilt phase of the trial and the judge characterized this argument in the penalty phase as”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 681 So. 2d 1112 - Sims v. State