Saunders v. State’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

44 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 45 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “[A]ppellant relies upon cases from this Court in which we have consistently found "some" harm in the failure of the trial court to charge on a lesser included offense simply by virtue of the fact that this error kept the jury from considering whether the defendant may have been guilty of that lesser offense. Appellant argues that this view of harm is consistent with the position taken by the United States Supreme Court in Beck v. Alabama, 447 U.S. 625 , 100 S.Ct. 2382 , 65 L.Ed.2d 392 (1980). In Beck the Supreme Court acknowledged the possibility that a jury, believing the defendant to have committed some crime, but given only the option to convict him of a greater offense, may have chosen to find him guilty of that greater offense, rather than to acquit him altogether, even though it had a reasonable doubt he really committed the greater offense. Id., 447 U.S. at 634 , 100 S.Ct. at 2388 , 65 L.Ed.2d at 401 . It is true that, without specifically articulating this as the rationale, we have routinely found "some" harm, and therefore reversed, whenever the trial court has failed to submit a lesser included offense that was requested and raised by the evidence—at least where that failure left the jury with the sole option either to convict the defendant of the greater offense or to acquit him. E.g., Moreno v. State, [ 702 S.W.2d 636, 641 (Tex.Crim.App.1986)]; Gibson v. State, 726 S.W.2d 129, 133 (Tex. Cr.App.1987); Hayes v. State, 728 S.W.2d 804, 810 (Tex.Cr.App.1987); Mitchell ”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. Graham v. State · Levan v. State

2. “harm must be assayed in light of the entire jury charge, the state of the evidence, including the contested issues and weight of probative evidence, the argument of counsel and any other relevant information revealed by the record of the trial as a whole.”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. Graham v. State · Braughton, Christopher Ernest

3. “This is so because the harm from denying a lesser offense instruction stems from the potential to place the jury in the dilemma of convicting for a greater offense in which the jury has reasonable doubt or releasing entirely from criminal liability a person the jury is convinced is a wrongdoer. The intervening lesser offense is an available compromise, giving the jury the ability to hold the wrongdoer accountable without having to find him guilty of the charged (greater) offense. While the existence of an instruction regarding an intervening lesser offense (such as manslaughter interposed between murder and criminally negligent homicide) does not automatically foreclose harm — because in some circumstances that intervening lesser offense may be the least plausible theory under the evidence — a court can conclude that the intervening offense instruction renders the error harmless if the jury’s rejection of that offense indicates that the jury legitimately believed that the defendant was guilty of the greater, charged offense.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. Orona v. State