Cooper v. Scroggy’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

8 federal appellate · 2 district · 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 21 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “Physical violence or threat of it by the custodian of a prisoner during detention serves no lawful purpose, invalidates confessions that otherwise would be convincing, and is universally condemned by the law. When present, there is no need to weigh or measure its effects on the will of the individual victim. The tendency of the innocent, as well as the guilty, to risk remote results of a false confession rather than suffer immediate pain is so strong that judges long ago found it necessary to guard against miscarriages of justice by treating any confession made concurrently with torture or threat of brutality as too untrustworthy to be received as evidence of guilt.”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. United States v. Jenkins · Zuliani v. State

2. “Determining whether a confession is “voluntary” for due process purposes entails an examination into the “totality of the circumstances” to determine whether the confession was procured by acceptable techniques that draw upon an essentially free and unconstrained choice, rather than by unacceptable tactics that extract their results from an overborne will. The critical line of distinction is between “self-direction” and “compulsion.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. 910 F. Supp. 2d 1008 - United States v. Ellis

3. “admission of out-of-court statements by a nontestifying co-defendant as substantive evidence against a defendant”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Rogers v. McMackin