Causey’s Empirical Analysis
Citation profile
2 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 23 later decisions — most recently February 2020
2 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 Harlow v. Fitzgerald · Payton v. New York · Johnson v. United States · Duncan v. Walker · SAUCIER v. KATZ Et Al.
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 23 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“an exigency exists when officers can demonstrate that a suspect has a willingness to use a weapon”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“The defendants also argue that other “exigent circumstances” existed that excused the warrant requirement. The defendants do not claim that immediate police action was necessary to prevent the destruction of evidence or to prevent O’Brien’s escape. Rather, they claim that exigent circumstances arose from the threat to the safety of the police officers and innocent bystanders in the area. However, to justify the officers’ failure to obtain a warrant, the facts must show that the threat to the officers or the public was “immediate.” The undisputed facts show that from the time O’Brien retreated into the house until just before the third probe, O’Brien had taken no action against the officers. Even when he initially confronted Johnson, he did not point the gun at anyone or verbally threaten to use it. While a reasonable fact finder might infer that the officers felt threatened, there is no evidence establishing that the threat of danger was “immediate.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“Although the officers might have inferred that an exigency did not exist from the plaintiffs’ assurances that no one was injured, it was nevertheless equally plausible and not unreasonable, for the officers to infer that either (1) the plaintiffs were concealing another person (perhaps incapacitated by the gunshots) inside the house or (2) the plaintiffs were being intimidated to give assurances by an unseen attacker in the residence.”
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.