Smith v. Phillips’s Empirical Analysis
1982
Citation profile
1,507 federal appellate · 206 district · 2,534 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 5,681 later decisions (59 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2026 · most notably United States v. Olano (1993), Wainwright v. Witt (1985)
1,507 federal appellate · 206 district · 2,534 state decisions — followed in 46 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
reviewedPhillips v. Smith (from Second Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Applies 28 U.S.C. § 2254 (Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996)
Relies on Brady v. State of Maryland · United States v. Agurs · Giglio v. United States · Witherspoon v. Illinois · Dandridge v. Williams
Cited together with Remmer v. United States · Strickland v. Washington · Irvin v. Dowd · McDonough Power Equipment, Inc. v. Greenwood · Jackson v. Virginia
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 5,681 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The touchstone of analysis `is the fairness of the trial, not the culpability of the prosecutor.'”
329 later decisions quote this exact passage“a revelation that the juror is an actual employee of the prosecuting agency, that the juror is a close relative of one of the participants in the trial or the criminal transaction, or that the juror was a witness or somehow involved in the criminal transaction.”
47 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“[i]n a criminal case, any private communication, contact, or tampering directly or indirectly, with a juror during a trial about the matter pending before the jury is ... deemed presumptively prejudicial.”
7 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrencee.g. Young v. Herring · Bebo v. Medeiros
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.