State v. Stacy’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

2 federal appellate · 7 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 9 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “The defendant called Dr. Frank L. Lu-ton, the Assistant Superintendent for Clinical Psychiatric Services at the Middle Tennessee Health Institute. Dr. Lu-ton has practiced psychiatry for forty-eight years. His career has been remarkable. His background includes graduation from the Medical School at Vanderbilt, four years of postgraduate training at Johns Hopkins, training in London, further training in Boston and as a teacher of psychiatry at Vanderbilt. He has been professer emeritus at Vanderbilt since 1963. We consider his testimony to be significant and conclusive. Dr. Luton was thoroughly familiar with all records pertaining to defendant and had interviewed and evaluated him on numerous occasions. He diagnosed his condition as “schizophrenic, chronic undifferentiated type.” * * * * * * Dr. Luton’s testimony sheds substantial light on the medication question. He testified that “[w]hen he’s not medicated, he becomes grossly psychotic, grossly ill, mentally ill.” He testified that with medication defendant “behaves in a relatively normal fashion,” but that he cannot be trusted to take his medication— “[h]e gets the idea that he doesn’t need it any longer.” Basing his testimony on his own examinations he voiced the opinion that at the time of the murder defendant “was mentally sick, seriously, at that time.” He testified that his condition was “chronic” and that it “goes back to the time when he committed the act and [that] at that time he was not able to judge the nature of”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
   e.g. Stacy v. Love

2. “The short and simple answer to this is that any fool faced with fear and foreboding can flee and hide. Such is the nature of even a wild beast. [But] Tennessee does not subscribe to the “wild beast” test of insanity, under which the defendant is held responsible unless wholly deprived of understanding and memory so as not to know what he was doing.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
   e.g. Stacy v. Love

3. “In the opinion of the majority, that issue [the inability of petitioner to control his conduct], like the issue of cognitive capac ity, was a question of fact to be determined by the jury.”

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