Johnson v. United States’s Empirical Analysis
318 U.S. 189 · 1943
Citation profile
667 federal appellate · 28 district · 296 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,213 later decisions (64 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2025 · most notably United States v. Olano (1993), Doyle v. Ohio (1976)
667 federal appellate · 28 district · 296 state decisions — followed in 36 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.
Appellate journey
reviewedUnited States v. Johnson (from Third Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Caminetti v. United States · Snyder v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts · United States v. Atkinson · Bruno v. United States
Cited together with Raffel v. United States · United States v. Atkinson · Miranda v. State of Arizona Vignera · Griffin v. California · Fitzpatrick 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 1,213 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“In reviewing criminal cases, it is particularly important for appellate courts to re-live the whole trial imaginatively and not to extract from episodes in isolation abstract questions of evidence and procedure. To turn a criminal appeal into a quest for error no more promotes the ends of justice than to acquiesce in low standards of criminal prosecution.”
26 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“If the privilege claimed by the witness be allowed, the matter is at an end. The claim of privilege and its allowance is properly no part of the evidence submitted to the jury, and no inferences whatever can be legitimately drawn by them from the legal assertion by the witness of his constitutional right. The allowance of the privilege would be a mockery of justice, if either party is to be affected injuriously by it.”
11 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Doyle v. Ohio · Gray v. State“In exceptional circumstances, especially in criminal cases, appellate courts, in the public interest, may, of their own motion, notice errors to which no exception has been taken, if the errors are obvious, or if they otherwise seriously affect the fairness, integrity, or public reputation of judicial proceeding.”
8 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.