Lowery v. McCaughtry’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

16 federal appellate · 2 district · 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 38 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “conceded that she had not found even one decision in the history of the United States using coram nobis to set aside a judgment rendered by another court”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Billy Kenneth Moore v. Al C. Parke · Finkelstein v. Spitzer

2. “Johnson v. Mississippi, 486 U.S. 578 , 108 S.Ct. 1981 , 100 L.Ed.2d 575 (1988), holds that if the rendering state sets aside its conviction, other states may not use that judgment to enhance their own sentences. Although the Court did not rely on the Full Faith and Credit Clause, it reserved the possibility that the Clause might have required the same decision. Id. at 585 n. 6, 108 S.Ct. at 1986 n. 6. If one state is forbidden to consider a conviction held invalid by the rendering state, perhaps it is required to accept as valid a conviction still on the books in the rendering state. Compare Strader v. Troy, 571 F.2d 1268 , 1268 (4th Cir.1978), with United States v. Jones, 907 F.2d 456 , 460-69 (4th Cir.1990), with id. at 482-83 (Wilkinson, J., dissenting). A state might believe, as the majority did in Jones, that to disregard another state’s conviction in sentencing is not to deny it full faith and credit; yet we do not suppose that a state could say that it may deny registration and enforcement to another state’s judgment so long as it gives lip service to the “validity” of that judgment. All the same, the Supreme Court has excused penal judgments from the seemingly absolute language of Art. IV § 1. E.g., Huntington v. Attrill, 146 U.S. 657 , 666-69, 13 S.Ct. 224 , 227-28, 36 L.Ed. 1123 (1892). Perhaps Art. IV § 2 cl. 2, which requires states to return escaping felons, is the measure of their obligation in criminal cases. Perhaps, however, the footnote in Johnson presages n”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Smith v. Farley

3. “tells us that a person serving in State A a sentence enhanced because of prior convictions in State B is not `in custody' in State B.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Capote v. Ray