Francis v. Franklin’s Empirical Analysis
1985
Citation profile
1,195 federal appellate · 91 district · 1,495 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 3,510 later decisions (101 by the Supreme Court) — most recently February 2026 · most notably United States v. Olano (1993), Teague v. Lane (1989)
1,195 federal appellate · 91 district · 1,495 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
reviewedFranklin v. Francis (from Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on In the Matter of Samuel Winship · Bruton v. United States · Jackson v. Denno · Wainwright v. Witt · Morissette v. United States
Cited together with Sandstrom v. Montana · In the Matter of Samuel Winship · Chapman v. State of California · Strickland v. Washington · Rose v. Clark
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 3,510 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“A mandatory presumption instructs the jury that it must infer the presumed fact if the State proves certain predicate facts. A permissive inference suggests to the jury a possible conclusion to be drawn if the State proves predicate facts, but does not require the jury to draw that conclusion.”
240 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. Brooks v. Kemp · Drake v. Kemp“attend closely the particular language of the trial court's instructions in a criminal case and strive to understand, make sense of, and follow the instructions given them.”
17 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“The Court today holds that contradictory instructions as to intent — one of which imparts to the jury an unconstitutional understanding of the allocation of burdens of persuasion — create a reasonable likelihood that a juror understood the instructions in an unconstitutional manner, unless other language in the charge explains the infirm language sufficiently to eliminate this possibility. If such a reasonable possibility of an unconstitutional understanding exists, we “have no way of knowing that [the defendant] was not convicted on the basis of the unconstitutional instruction.” Sandstrom, 442 U.S., at 526 [99 S.Ct., at 2460]. For this reason, it has been settled law since Stromberg v. California, 283 U.S. 359 [ 51 S.Ct. 532 , 75 L.Ed. 1117 ] (1931), that when there exists a reasonable possibility that the jury relied on an unconstitutional understanding of the law in reaching a guilty verdict, that verdict must be set aside.”
14 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. Humanik v. Beyer · State v. Oglesby
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.