Fletcher v. Weir’s Empirical Analysis
1982
Citation profile
292 federal appellate · 21 district · 820 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,318 later decisions (27 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2026 · most notably Brecht v. Abrahamson (1993), Teague v. Lane (1989)
292 federal appellate · 21 district · 820 state decisions — followed in 43 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
reviewedWeir v. Fletcher (from Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Miranda v. State of Arizona Vignera · Doyle v. Ohio · Cupp v. Naughten · Jenkins v. Anderson · United States v. Hale
Cited together with Doyle v. Ohio · Jenkins v. Anderson · Miranda v. State of Arizona Vignera · Anderson v. Charles · Wainwright v. Greenfield
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 1,318 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“In the absence of the sort of affirmative assurances embodied in the Miranda warnings, we do not believe that it violates due process of law for a State to permit cross-examination as to postarrest silence when a defendant chooses to take the stand. A State is entitled, in such situations, to leave to the judge and jury under its own rules of evidence the resolution of the extent to which postarrest silence may be deemed to impeach a criminal defendant’s own testimony.”
45 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Silence in the wake of these [Miranda ] warnings may be nothing more than the arrestee's exercise of these Miranda rights. Thus, every post-arrest silence is insolubly ambiguous because of what the State is required to advise the person arrested ... Moreover, while it is true that the Miranda warnings contain no express assurance that silence will carry no penalty, such assurance is implicit to any person who receives the warnings. In such circumstances, it would be fundamentally unfair and a deprivation of due process to allow the arrested person's silence to be used to impeach an explanation subsequently offered at trial.”
12 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[i]n Jenkins, as in other post-Doyle cases, we have consistently explained Doyle as a case where the government had induced silence by implicitly assuring the defendant that his silence would not be used against him.”
8 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.