Simmons v. United States’s Empirical Analysis
142 U.S. 148 · 1891
Citation profile
301 federal appellate · 21 district · 234 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 661 later decisions (43 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2018 · most notably United States v. Jorn (1971), Arizona v. Washington (1978)
301 federal appellate · 21 district · 234 state decisions — followed in 40 states
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Relies on United States v. Josef Perez · Vicksburg v. Putnam · United States v. Philadelphia & Reading Railroad · Lovejoy v. United States
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 661 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“the security which the public have for the faithful, sound and conscientious exercise of this discretion,”
12 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““There can be no condition of things in which the necessity for the exercise of this power [to grant a mistrial] is more manifest, in order to prevent the defeat of the ends of public justice, than when it is made to appear to the court that, either by reason of facts existing when the jurors were sworn, but not then disclosed or known to the court, or by reason of outside influences brought to bear on the jury pending the trial, the jurors, or any of them, are subject to such bias or prejudice as not to stand impartial between the government and the accused.””
9 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. State v. McDonald · Ex Parte Hunter““But at the outset of his charge he had told them, in so many words, that the facts were to be decided by the jury, and not by the court. And it is so well settled, by a long series of decisions of this court, that the judge presiding at a trial, civil or criminal, in any court of the United States, is authorized, whenever he thinks it will assist the jury in arriving at a just conclusion, to express to them his opinion upon the questions of fact which he submits to their determination, that it is only necessary to refer to two or three recent cases in which the judge’s opinion on matters of fact was quite as plainly and strongly expressed to the jury as in the case at bar.” (cases cited) (emphasis ours)”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.