United States v. Brown’s Empirical Analysis
500 F.2d 375 · 1974
Citation profile
58 federal appellate · 3 district · 32 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 114 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently April 2016 · most notably United States v. Benchimol (1985), United States v. Pollard (1992)
58 federal appellate · 3 district · 32 state decisions — followed in 16 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
Applies 18 U.S.C. § 495
Relies on Santobello v. New York · United States v. Gallington · United States ex rel. Culbreath v. Rundle
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 114 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“We have no occasion to consider the propriety of sentence, or recommendation as to sentence, as an element of a plea bargain, but it is manifest that the consideration which induced defendant’s guilty plea was not simply the prospect of a formal recitation of a possible sentence, but rather the promise that an Assistant United States Attorney would make a recommendation on sentencing. This could reasonably be expected to be the sound advice, expressed with some degree of advocacy, of a government officer familiar both with the defendant and with his record and cognizant of his public duty as a prosecutor for the United States. Undoubtedly the district court had this understanding of the role of an Assistant United States Attorney at sentencing when he sought the prosecutor’s recommendation. Certainly he was entirely correct in inquiring into the basis of the recommendation to aid him in the exercise of his sentencing discretion. Whether the prosecutor’s halfheartedness in presenting the recommendation was a factor in the district court’s imposing a sentence more severe than that “recommended” is a matter into which we need not inquire. In Santobello, where one prosecutor had promised not to make a sentencing recommendation at the time of plea bargaining and then another prosecutor had called for the maximum punishment at the time of sentencing, there was a strong, unequivocal statement by the trial judge that his sentence was not affected in any way by the prosecutor’s recomm”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[t]he government effectively undercut[s] the agreement”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“an objective one—whether the plea bargain agreement has been breached or not—irrespective of prosecutorial motivations or justifications for the failure in performance.”
2 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.