United States v. Brown’s Empirical Analysis
490 F.2d 758 · 1973
Citation profile
44 federal appellate · 2 district · 149 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 205 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently August 2021 · most notably United States v. Pheaster (1976), United States v. Decoster (1976)
44 federal appellate · 2 district · 149 state decisions — followed in 30 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.
Relationships
Relies on Barker v. Wingo · Bruton v. United States · Green v. United States · Price v. Georgia · Mutual Life Ins Co of New York v. Hillmon
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 205 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“A statement of the declarant’s then existing state of mind, emotion, sensation, or physical condition (such as intent, plan, motive, design, mental feeling, pain, and bodily health), but not including a statement of memory or belief to prove the fact remembered or believed unless it relates to the execution, revocation, identification, or terms of declarant’s will.”
14 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“[f]or the state of mind of the victim to be relevant to prove the state of mind of the accused, some nexus must exist which inferentially implicates the accused, such as by showing “previous threats made by the defendant towards the victim, narrations of past incidents of violence on the part of the defendant or general verbalizations of fear of the defendant.””
9 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““While there are undoubtedly a number of possible situations in which such statements may be relevant, the courts have developed three rather well-defined categories in which the need for such statements overcomes almost any possible prejudice. The most common of these involves defendant’s claim of self-defense as justification for the killing. When such a defense is asserted, a defendant’s assertion that the deceased first attacked him may be rebutted by the extrajudicial declarations of the victim that he feared the defendant, thus rendering it unlikely that the deceased was in fact the aggressor in the first instance. Second, where defendant seeks to defend on the ground that the deceased committed suicide, evidence that the victim had made statements inconsistent with a suicidal bent are highly relevant. A third situation involves a claim of accidental death, where, for example, defendant’s version of the facts is that the victim picked up defendant’s gun and was accidentally killed while toying with it. In such cases the deceased’s statements of fear as to guns or of defendant himself (showing that he would never go near defendant under any circumstances) are relevant in that they tend to rebut this defense. Of course, even in these cases, where the evidence is of a highly prejudicial nature, it has been held that it must be excluded in spite of a significant degree of relevance.””
6 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.