State v. Brecht’s Empirical Analysis
1971
Citation profile
4 federal appellate · 26 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 30 later decisions — most recently June 2025 · most notably State v. Ball (1983), Armstrong v. State (1999)
4 federal appellate · 26 state decisions
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 Miranda v. State of Arizona Vignera · Chapman v. State of California · Katz v. United States · Davis v. United States · Pavesich v. New England Life Insurance
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 30 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“"The violation of the constitutional right to privacy and against compulsory self-incrimination is as detrimental to the person to whom the protection is guaranteed in the one case as in the other. To distinguish between classes of violators is tantamount to destruction of the right itself. "* * * "This Court in the present case would be remiss were it not to recognize that evidence obtained by the unlawful or unreasonable invasion of several of the constitutionally protected rights guaranteed to its citizens by both the federal and Montana constitutions properly comes within the contemplation of this Court's exclusionary rule. To do otherwise would lend Court approval to a fictional distinction between classes of citizens: those who are bound to respect the Constitution and those who are not. Were the exclusionary rule to recognize such distinctions it would by indirection circumvent the rule established by this Court to enforce these rights and would in fact render the rule and the constitutional guarantees it protects meaningless."”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“I got my shotgun out of hock, I am coming down and I will use it if I have to”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. State v. Coburn
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.