United States v. Smith’s Empirical Analysis
500 F.2d 293 · 1974
Citation profile
46 federal appellate · 1 district · 3 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 57 later decisions — most recently June 2025 · most notably United States v. Leon (1976), United States v. Pearce (1990)
46 federal appellate · 1 district · 3 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
Applies 18 U.S.C. § 1955 · 18 U.S.C. § 2 · 18 U.S.C. § 2518 (Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986)
Relies on Chapman v. State of California · Kotteakos v. United States · Griffin v. California · Berger v. United States · Donnelly v. DeChristoforo
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 57 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all; and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“had the effect of shifting the burden of proof from the government to the defendants and abrogating the presumption of innocence to which [the defendants] were entitled.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““To weigh the error’s effect against the entire setting of the record without relation to the verdict or judgment would be almost to work in a vacuum ... In criminal causes that outcome is conviction. This is different, or may be, from guilt in fact. It is guilt in law, established by the judgment of laymen. And the question is, not were they right in their judgment, regardless of the error or its effect upon the verdict. It is rather what effect the error had or reasonably may be taken to have had upon the jury’s decision. The crucial thing is the impact of the thing done wrong on the minds of other men, not on one’s own, in the total setting “This must take account of what the error meant to them, not singled out and standing alone, but in relation to all else that happened. And one must judge others’ reactions not by his own, but with allowance for how others might react and not be regarded generally as acting without reason. This is the important difference, but one easy to ignore when the sense of guilt comes strongly from the record. “If, when all is said and done, the conviction is sure that the error did not influence the jury, or had but very slight effect, the verdict and the judgment should stand, except perhaps where the departure is from a constitutional norm or a specific command of Congress . . . But if one cannot say, with fair assurance, after pondering all that happened without stripping the erroneous action from the whole, that the judgment was not substant”
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.