How do you reduce word counts, remove extraneous information, and declutter your briefs? Simple. Clean up your parentheticals with (cleaned up).
On January 11, 2018, the Utah Court of Appeals issued State v. Cady, 2018 UT App 8, and in the process joined the growing number of courts climbing on-board the (cleaned up) citation movement. See State v. Cady, 2018 UT App 8, ¶ 10. At paragraph 10 of its opinion, the court quoted from the Utah Supreme Court’s opinion in State v. Bagnes, 2014 UT 4, ¶ 10, 322 P.3d 719. The quote in the Bagnes opinion was this:
we may reverse only when “it is apparent that there is not sufficient competent evidence as to each element of the crime charged.” State v. Boyd, 2001 UT 30, ¶ 13, 25 P.3d 985 (internal quotation marks omitted). Our review of the evidence itself is deferential. See State v. Dunn, 850 P.2d 1201, 1212 (Utah 1993). We may reverse a verdict ―only when the evidence, so viewed, is sufficiently inconclusive or inherently improbable such that reasonable minds must have entertained a reasonable doubt that defendant committed the crime for which he or she was convicted.” Id.
So normally, your citation would look something like this: State v. Bagnes, 2014 UT 4, ¶ 10, 322 P.3d 719 (quoting State v. Boyd, 2001 UT 30, ¶ 13, 25 P.3d 985 (internal quotation marks omitted) (quoting State v. Dunn, 850 P.2d 1201, 1212 (Utah 1993)).
Employing the (cleaned up) citation method, the quotation and accompanying citation in Cady became this:
we may reverse only when it is apparent that there is not sufficient competent evidence as to each element of the crime charged. Our review of the evidence itself is deferential. We may reverse a verdict only when the evidence, so viewed, is sufficiently inconclusive or inherently improbable such that reasonable minds must have entertained a reasonable doubt that [the] defendant committed the crime for which he or she was convicted.
State v. Bagnes, 2014 UT 4, ¶ 10, 322 P.3d 719 (cleaned up)
The court of appeals did it again later in its opinion, at ¶ 23, and what would have been this:
There is perhaps no more axiomatic statement when reviewing jury verdicts than this: The “‘choice between conflicting testimony is within the province of the jury.’” State v. Pedersen, 802 P.2d 1328, 1330 (Utah Ct. App. 1990) (quoting State v. Ireland, 773 P.2d 1375, 1379 (Utah 1989); accord State v. Gentry, 747 P.2d 1032, 1039 (Utah 1987)).
Became this
There is perhaps no more axiomatic statement when reviewing jury verdicts than this: The “choice between conflicting testimony is within the province of the jury.” State v. Pedersen, 802 P.2d 1328, 1330 (Utah Ct. App. 1990) (cleaned up)
The court noted the momentous occasion:
The parenthetical “cleaned up,” while perhaps unfamiliar, is being used with increasing frequency to indicate that internal quotation marks, alterations, and/or citations have been omitted from a quotation. For an example of its use in a published opinion, see United States v. Reyes, 866 F.3d 316, 321 (5th Cir. 2017). For a more thorough discussion regarding the practicality of the parenthetical, see Jack Metzler, Cleaning Up Quotations, Journal of Appellate Practice and Process (forthcoming 2018), https://ssrn.com/abstract=2935374 [https://perma.cc/XRQ4-WCLX]. Finally, for a graphic representation of the phrase’s trend in popularity among legal writing circles, see @SCOTUSPlaces, Twitter (Sept. 22, 2017, 7:03 AM), https://twitter.com/SCOTUSPlaces/status/911229408689696768 [https://perma.cc/4FKJ-QYSE].
State v. Cady, 2018 UT App 8, ¶ 10 n.2.
Remember this is a clean-up tool only. As its creator, Jack Metzler, explains:
I propose that legal writers a new parenthetical—(cleaned up)—to avoid the clutter that quotations gather as they are successively requoted and altered from court opinion to court opinion, as well as the citation baggage that accumulates along the way. (Cleaned up) signals that in quoting a court’s decision the author has (i) removed extraneous, nonsubstantive material like brackets, quotation marks, ellipses, footnote signals, and internal citations; and (ii) may have changed capitalization without brackets. (Cleaned up) also is the author’s affirmative representation that the alterations were made for readability and that the quotation otherwise faithfully reproduces the quoted text.
See Metzler, Jack, Cleaning Up Quotations at 14 (March 17, 2017). Journal of Appellate Practice and Process, 2018, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2935374 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2935374.