Tucker v. Kemp’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

11 federal appellate · 1 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 17 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “On September 19, 1978, the badly decomposed body of Edna Sandefur was discovered in a secluded area of Macon, Georgia. Two days later, Tucker admitted his complicity in the abduction and murder of Mrs. Sandefur but claimed that his friend, Willie Lee Mahone, had killed her. In a later statement to police, however, Tucker confessed that he alone abducted and killed Mrs. Sandefur. He stated that after the murder he undressed the victim and burned her clothes to destroy fingerprints. He took the police to the scene of the crime, indentified the murder weapon (an iron pipe) and the charred remains of Mrs. Sandefur’s clothing. Finally, Tucker took police officers to where he had disposed of Mrs. Sandefur’s purse and credit cards. Tucker’s confession was tape recorded and played for the jury during the trial. Several eyewitnesses also testified that they saw Tucker driving the victim’s car shortly after the murder. Willie Lee Ma-hone testified that on the night of the murder Tucker bragged about killing “a white woman” and “said he enjoyed killing ... and [that] he’ll do it again one day.” Transcript of Evidence, Volume III, at 676-77. An FBI witness identified Tucker’s thumb print on one of the victim’s credit cards. An expert witness testified that “a medium brown Caucasion pubic hair” was found on clothes seized in Tucker’s apartment several days after the killing. Id., Volume II, at 649. Tucker is black; Mrs. Sandefur was white. The sentencing phase began after the jury found T”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Tucker v. Kemp