McManus v. State’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

1 federal appellate · 33 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 34 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “'the best position to gauge the surrounding cireumstances of an event and its impact on the jury.'”

   6 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. Barnett v. State · Morgan v. State

2. “While the testimony was often equivocal, the consensus of the witnesses was that the medications assisted McManus in participating in his trial. Without the medications, McManus proved unable to cope with the stress of the proceeding. McManus’s situation is markedly different from the defendant who requires medication to attain competence so that the trial can begin. Before trial, Mc-Manus was competent and participated in preparing his case. The administration of medication appeared to manage a sudden onset of stress, rather than to medicate a diagnosed psychosis. Reliance on psychotropic drugs during, trial is obviously to be approached with great care, and competency hearings to evaluate the effects on a defendant’s ability to appropriately participate in his or her defense are very important. In the case at bar, we cannot say that the trial court’s competency determination was clearly erroneous....”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. McManus v. Neal

3. “[0]n the issue of competency, we were faced with a situation that from the testimony of the physicians and the people involved, that this Defendant was having panic attacks, because he was on trial, in this trial. And the question was if we postpone the trial, and have the trial two weeks or two months from now or two years from now, is there any reason to believe that he would not be having these panic attacks again, because they, apparently, if they were valid, and I have no reason to believe they weren’t, were caused by the trial. What this Court tried to do, then, was to get competent people to either adjust his medication or do whatever it took to get him in good enough shape to be competent to stand trial in this very serious trial, because the alternative would be never to try him, which wasn’t acceptable. And by the time they were done, I was convinced that he was competent.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. McManus v. Neal