Stevens v. United States’s Empirical Analysis
370 F.2d 485 · 1966
Citation profile
17 federal appellate · 7 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 24 later decisions — most recently September 1980
17 federal appellate · 7 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 Luck v. United States · Samuel H. Hood v. United States of America, Harry A. Jackson v. United States · Walker v. United States · Clawans v. District of Columbia
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 24 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“"A serious question of fundamental unfairness arises when an evidentiary rule may deter a defendant from testifying in his own behalf or if he does testify subjects him to evidence highly prejudicial on the issue of guilt though inadmissible for that purpose. [1] The present rule permits this on the theory that it helps the jury determine whether or not to believe the defendant. Yet, to test the rule by this case, how does the bare fact that appellant was found guilty of larceny in 1935, when he was in his early twenties, affect his credibility in testifying at his 1965 trial? And if we assume the 1935 conviction to be relevant to his 1965 credibility, does not the effect of that conviction, together with his record of seven other convictions, carry over to the issue of guilt at the 1965 trial, an issue as to which his prior convictions were inadmissible? I think it does. A jury cannot be expected to departmentalize such evidence. "Perhaps the evidence of a prior criminal record should be limited to a conviction which bears clearly on credibility perjury, for example. * * *"”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. State v. Knee · State v. Dunn“The trial court is not required to allow impeachment by prior conviction every time a defendant takes the stand in his own defense. The statute, in our view, leaves room for the operation of a sound judicial discretion to play upon the circumstances as they unfold in a particular case.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent“I do not refer to those special circumstances in which evidence of like offenses is admissible during the prosecution's cases in chief to show a course of conduct.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. State v. Dunn
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.