Smith v. United States’s Empirical Analysis
358 F.2d 833 · 1966
Citation profile
102 federal appellate · 9 district · 47 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 171 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently December 2020 · most notably McCray v. State of Illinois (1967), United States v. Shaw (1983)
102 federal appellate · 9 district · 47 state decisions — followed in 19 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 Wong Sun v. United States · Aguilar v. Texas · Brinegar v. United States · Jones v. United States · Beck v. State of Ohio
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 171 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“(P)robable cause is the sum total of layers of information and the synthesis of what the police have heard, what they know, and what they observe as trained officers. We weigh not individual layers but the 'laminated' total.”
14 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“The correct test is whether a warrant if sought could have been obtained by law enforcement agency application which disclosed its corporate information, not whether any one particular officer could have obtained it on what information he individually possessed.”
7 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. In Re MEB · In re M.E.B.““We avail ourselves of the occasion to make it clear that in a large metropolitan police establishment the collective knowledge of the organization as a whole can be imputed to an individual officer when he is requested or authorized by superiors or associates to make an arrest. The whole complex of swift modern communication in a large police department would be a futility if the authority of an individual officer was to be circumscribed by the scope of his first hand knowledge of facts concerning a crime or alleged crime. ‘'When the police department possesses information which would support an arrest without a warrant in the circumstances, the arresting officer, if acting under orders based on that information, need not personally or first hand know all the facts. The test, as we have said, is whether a prudent ancl cautious officer in tiiose circumstances would have reasonable grounds —not proof or actual knowledge — to believe that a crime had been committed and that appellant was the offender.””
2 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.