Wood v. Milyard’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

1 federal appellate · 2 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 5 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “The difficulty is that a proxy for legislative direction must give way when we have express legislative direction already in hand. In this case, we have unambiguous rulings from the Colorado Supreme Court that the Colorado legislature will tolerate but one murder conviction per death. We are not at liberty to ignore that guidance and replace it with the results of a proxy test intended only to fill gaps when express legislative direction is unavailable.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. People v. Wood

2. “first and second degree murder. The [mittimus] then appears to merge the two convictions only for the purpose of imposing as sentence a single prison term of life imprisonment. At no point does the judgment suggest the court vacated either murder conviction as it had to. Id. at 1196 (internal citations omitted). That Wood received only one sentence for both murder convictions was of little moment to the court because”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. People v. Wood

3. “permit[ ] the elimination of [Wood's] lesser, second degree murder conviction-or at least permit[ ] the Colorado courts that tried him to choose which conviction [would] go.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. People v. Wood