62 N.C. App. 1 - State v. Green’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

24 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 24 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “intended merely to provide defendants with a means to resist a finding of prior convictions as an aggravating factor in appropriate cases. Twenty years after Gideon, cases in which a defendant was convicted while indigent and unrepresented should be the exception rather than the rule. A defendant generally will know, without research, whether this occurred. In my view it is not the preferable policy to put the State to the burden of producing records, at times from multiple counties or even multiple jurisdictions, to establish something which only rarely will enable a defendant to resist a finding of the prior convictions as an aggravating factor, and which, when it will, is generally within the defendant’s knowledge without the necessity of research, possibly in a multiplicity of geographical areas.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
   e.g. State v. Thompson

2. “The unlawful killing proven here was accomplished by shooting the victim with a gun, a deadly weapon. Evidence of use of the deadly weapon to shoot the victim was thus necessary to prove the unlawful killing, which was the essence of the offense.”

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