Butler v. State’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

2 district · 19 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. “[t]he murderous mens rea under [the theory of felony murder based on armed robbery] does not entail any intent to kill at all but only the intent to perpetrate the underlying felony---- Second-degree murder, by contrast, requires the specific intent either to kill or to commit grievous bodily harm against the victim. Although second-degree murder of the intent-to-kill variety is thereby a lesser, included offense subsumed within premeditated murder, it is not a lesser included offense within felony-murder.”

   4 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. 238 Md. App. 295 - Middleton v. State · Higginbotham v. State

2. ““Collateral estoppel, to an extent not shared by true double jeopardy or res judicata, is stubbornly fact-bound. When looking at a first juridical event to determine its impact upon a pending second juridical event, we are concerned not with the legal implications of the first event, as we would be in the true double jeopardy or res judicata context, but only with findings of fact actually or almost certainly made by lay fact finders. We are indifferent to whether those findings were logical or internally consistent. Our exclusive concern is with, to the extent we can discern it, what was found as a matter of fact and not with what might have been found or what should have been found.” (Emphasis in original)”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. State v. Baxter

3. “The point to be made in recounting this constitutional revisionism is that when two or more distinct bodies of doctrine — stemming from different origins, serving different albeit related purposes, and implemented by different rules — are generically labeled with the same “umbrella term,” there arises the recurring semantic danger that a statement in the case law, correct in its original context of one variety of double jeopardy law, may be randomly misapplied to some other variety where it does nothing but generate confusion. This is why any discussion of collateral estoppel should meticulously confine itself to nothing but collateral estoppel cases.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Mason v. State