Biggers v. Neil’s Empirical Analysis
448 F.2d 91 · 1971
Citation profile
12 federal appellate · 2 district · 4 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 19 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently January 2019
12 federal appellate · 2 district · 4 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.
Appellate journey
Relationships
Relies on Chapman v. State of California · United States v. Wade · Simmons v. United States · Stovall v. Denno · Townsend v. Sain
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 19 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[T]here is no indication that a truly concerted effort was made to produce suitable subjects for a line-up. Aside from a phone call to the juvenile home and a screening of Metro Jail inmates no other efforts were made. There are several other prison facilities in the area and there is no evidence that any effort was made to screen them for subjects. The Court sees no reason why this could not have been done in order to maximize the fairness of the identification process. Here, there was no evidence of any deathbed urgency as in Stovall which would have precluded the police from delaying the identification procedure until a suitable line-up could have been arranged. The crime was seven months old, the victim was fully recovered and well, and there are no other indications that the ends of justice demanded an immediate show-up rather than a much more reliable line-up. Furthermore, none of the other circumstances which the above discussed cases indicate may justify a show-up existed in the instant case. The evidence clearly shows that the complaining witness did not get an opportunity to obtain a good view of the suspect during the commission of the crime. Also, the show-up confrontation was not conducted near the time of the alleged crime, but, rather, some seven months after its commission. Finally the witness in the instant case was unable to give either an independent photographic identification of the suspect or a good physical description of her assailant.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“But conventional notions of finality in criminal litigation cannot be permitted to defeat the manifest federal policy that federal constitutional rights of personal liberty shall not be denied without the fullest opportunity for plenary federal judicial review.”
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.