Lekas v. Briley’s Empirical Analysis
405 F.3d 602 · 2005
Citation profile
15 federal appellate · 2 district · 1 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 82 later decisions — most recently June 2025 · most notably Christensen v. County of Boone (2007), Alioto v. Town of Lisbon (2011)
15 federal appellate · 2 district · 1 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 28 U.S.C. § 1915 · 28 U.S.C. § 2201 · 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (Civil Rights Act of 1871 / Section 1983 (Ku Klux Klan Act)) · 42 U.S.C. § 1997E
Relies on Board of Regents of State Colleges v. Roth · Wolff v. McDonnell · Bell v. Wolfish · Hishon v. King & Spalding · Sandin v. Conner
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 82 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Every state must have somewhere in its prison system single-person cells in which prisoners are sometimes confined not because they have misbehaved but simply because the prison has no other space, wishes to protect some prisoners from others, wishes to keep prisoners isolated from one another in order to minimize the risk of riots or other disturbances, wishes to prevent the spread of disease, and so forth. Almost 6 percent of the nation’s prison inmates are in segregation, ... and it appears that the great majority of these are not in disciplinary segregation ... so even a prisoner who had committed a white-collar crime and had been assigned to the lowest-security prison in the state’s system might find himself in segregation for a nondisciplinary reason.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“An action taken in retaliation for the exercise of a constitutionally protected right is actionable under § 1983 even if the act, when taken for a different reason, would have been proper. This includes retaliation against an inmate for exercising his constitutional right to access the courts or to use the prison grievance process. Indeed, a prisoner can sufficiently state a claim for relief when he alleges that prison officials issued baseless disciplinary tickets against him in retaliation for pursuit of administrative grievances.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Watkins v. Kasper“Our system of justice is adversarial, and our judges are busy people. If they are given plausible reasons for dismissing a complaint, they are not going to do the plaintiff's research and try to discover whether there might be something to say against the defendants' reasoning.”
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.