United States v. Ceccolini’s Empirical Analysis
1978
Citation profile
462 federal appellate · 72 district · 534 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,365 later decisions (42 by the Supreme Court) — most recently February 2022 · most notably Illinois v. Gates (1983), United States v. Leon (1984)
462 federal appellate · 72 district · 534 state decisions — followed in 42 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. Ceccolini (from Second Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Wong Sun v. United States · Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics · Brown v. Illinois · Stone v. Powell · United States v. Calandra
Cited together with Wong Sun v. United States · Brown v. Illinois · Nardone v. United States · Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States · Miranda v. State of Arizona Vignera
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 1,365 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Witnesses are not like guns or documents which remain hidden from view until one turns over a sofa or opens a filing cabinet. Witnesses can, and often do, come forward and offer evidence entirely of their own volition. And evaluated properly, the degree of free will necessary to dissipate the taint will very likely be found more often in the case of live-witness testimony than other kinds of evidence.”
86 later decisions quote this exact passage“since the cost of excluding live-witness testimony often will be greater, a closer, more direct link between the illegality and that kind of testimony is required”
14 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[t]he penalties visited upon the Government, and in turn upon the public, because its officers have violated the law must bear some relation to the purposes which the law is to serve.”
7 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.