Junior v. Anderson’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

6 federal appellate ·

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

1. “• Unanswered questions abound. Had there been a time when all the prisoners in the tier had been allowed to mingle in the dayroom? If so, had there been violence, which the rule permitting only half the prisoners to be in the dayroom at the same time had been adopted to prevent from recurring? How frequently under the current rule of separation (though flouted when the attack occurred) do prisoners from the two rows mingle in the dayroom, and with what consequences? Did the defendant know that just a few weeks earlier the plaintiffs cellmate had been assaulted and stabbed in the dayroom and that according to him prisoners from the supposedly locked-down side of the tier had been in the dayroom at the time? And how, by the way, are prisoners assigned to one row or the other? Randomly? Or is an attempt made to keep prisoners who are likely to get into fights with each other apart? Also useful would be the criminal records of the prisoners at the time of the attack—just how dangerous were those prisoners? And finally there is the question whether the two Andersons are related—a question the plaintiff can’t investigate on his own. All these gaps cry out for evidence that a lawyer could obtain but the plaintiff could not. The judge should have realized this and tried to get him a lawyer.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. 57 F. Supp. 3d 889 - Harper v. Bolton