Turner v. Mellon’s Empirical Analysis
1953
Citation profile
63 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 69 later decisions — most recently March 2019 · most notably 42 Cal. 3d 1051 - Pool v. City of Oakland (1986), 32 Cal. 4th 350 - Hagberg v. California Federal Bank FSB (2004)
63 state decisions — followed in 11 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 Boyd v. United States · Weeks v. United States · Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States · McDonald v. United States · United States v. Di Re
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 69 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““We think it serves the public interest that citizens who have been criminally wronged may without fear of civil reprisal for an honest mistake, report to the police or public prosecutor the facts of a crime and in good faith, without malice, identify to the best of their ability to such public officers the perpetrator of the crime. Investigation and action from then on are the responsibility of the public employees who are skilled in that work and who are paid to perform it.” [ 257 P.2d at 17 ].”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage““All that Mellon did here was to report the commission of the crimes and state to the police officers his honest but mistaken opinion that plaintiff was the robber. This conduct did not in law amount to taking ‘some active part in bringing about the unlawful arrest,’ and since Mellon did not participate in the false imprisonment neither he nor his employer, whose only liability would necessarily rest on the doctrine of respondeat superior, is liable therefor.””
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“The victims of crimes should not be held to the responsibility of guarantors of the accuracy of their identifications .... A view contrary to that ... would, we think, inevitably tend to discourage a private citizen from imparting information of a tentative, honest belief to the police and, hence, would contravene the public interest which must control.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage
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.