Higgins v. United States’s Empirical Analysis
205 F.2d 650 · 1953
Citation profile
38 federal appellate · 4 district · 6 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 55 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently May 2010 · most notably Greenwood v. United States (1956), United States v. Comstock (2010)
38 federal appellate · 4 district · 6 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
Applies 18 U.S.C. § 1718 · 18 U.S.C. § 4244 · 28 U.S.C. § 1291
Relies on Cohen v. Beneficial Industrial Loan Corp. · Sporza v. . German Savings Bank · Dowdell · Wells v. Attorney General of 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 55 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The trouble with defendant’s contention is. that while the text of the order is in the form of a judgment of insanity, it is actually much less than that. It certainly does not, in fact, judicially declare that defendant has the general status of lunacy. The restraint is only to the extent and until defendant is mentally fit for trial or other disposition is made in the premises. Since the order does not affect the status of defendant as to sanity but is limited in effect as just indicated, it follows that the attack on the constitutionality of §§ 4244 and 4246 and the attack on the legality of the order on the ground that defendant was entitled to a jury trial as to his sanity, fails, entirely.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“Section 4246 provides that whenever the trial court determines, under sections 4244 and 4245, that an accused is or was mentally incompetent, the court may commit the accused to the custody of the Attorney General until the accused becomes mentally competent to stand trial or until the pending charges against him are disposed of according to law. Further, under section 4246, if the court after a hearing as provided for in sections 4244 and 4245 finds that the conditions specified in section 4247 exist, the commitment will be governed by the provisions of section 4248. 98”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“While the care of insane persons is essentially the function of the states in their sovereign capacity as parens patriae, and while the federal government has neither constitutional nor inherent power to enter the general field of lunacy, Congress has the power to make provision for the proper care and treatment of persons who become temporarily insane while in custody of the United States awaiting trial upon criminal charges, and to make provision for the care and treatment of federal prisoners who become mentally incompetent during their incarceration after conviction.”
1 later decision 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.