71 Ill. App. 2d 480 - People v. Odom’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

19 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 19 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““The public defender exercised none of the preliminary procedures available to him prior to trial. The case was brought to trial on February 5, 1964, some three months after the public defender’s appointment to represent him. During that entire time both client and attorney were in the same city, the former being confined in the county jail where he was always available for consultation. Despite this fact, his attorney failed to file a motion to suppress the confession under provisions of Ill. Rev. Stat. 1963, Ch. 38, Sec 114 — 11. Such a motion would have required the State to sustain the burden of satisfying the court that the confession was given voluntarily if such was to be used in evidence at trial. Due process requires that a coerced confession be excluded from consideration by the jury, and a defendant has a constitutional right to object to the use of a confession and to have a fair hearing on the issue of voluntariness, uninfluenced by the truth or falsity of the confession. Jackson v. Denno, supra. But in the instant case defense counsel made no effort to exclude the confession despite the fact that he must have known, if he conferred at all with his client or his client’s wife, that serious question existed as to the voluntariness of the confession. In so doing he gave his client no protection whatsoever against being convicted on the basis of a coerced confession. To compound the offense, no instruction was even given to the jury to disregard the confession if it”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 90 Ill. App. 3d 76 - People v. Neeley