United States v. Blackwell’s Empirical Analysis
459 F.3d 739 · 2006
Citation profile
40 federal appellate · 1 district · 5 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 153 later decisions — most recently February 2025 · most notably United States v. Warshak (2010), United States v. Caver (2006)
40 federal appellate · 1 district · 5 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 Brady v. State of Maryland · United States v. Booker · Kotteakos v. United States · United States v. Bagley · Berger v. United States
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 153 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“To convict any one of the defendants of a conspiracy charge in the superseding indictment, the government must convince you beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was a member of the conspiracy charged in the indictment. If the government fails to prove this, then you must find that defendant was not guilty of the conspiracy charge, even if you find that he or she was a member of some other conspiracy. Proof that a defendant was a member of some other conspiracy not charged in the superseding indictment is not enough to convict. But proof that a defendant was a member of some other conspiracy would not prevent you from returning a guilty verdict, if the government also proved that he was a member of the conspiracy charged in the indictment.... To prove a single conspiracy, the government must convince you- that each of the members agreed to participate in what he knew was a group activity directed toward a common goal. There must be proof of an agreement on an overall objective. But a single conspiracy may exist even if all the members did not know each other, or never sat down together, or did not know what roles all the other members played. And a single conspiracy may exist even if different members joined at different times, or the membership of the group changed.....”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Assuming, without deciding, that the imposition of the term in this case constituted error, we do not find that the error was 'plain' or obvious.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. People v. Lacallo“[T]he district court committed no error ... in considering Defendant's ability to pay.”
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.