Bracken v. Cato’s Empirical Analysis
54 F.2d 457 · 1931
Citation profile
8 federal appellate · 2 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 11 later decisions — most recently November 1983
8 federal appellate · 2 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 Diaz v. United States · Rogers v. The Marshal · King v. Brown · Gust Heye & Co. v. W. L. Moody & Co. · Eastland County v. Hazel
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 11 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“. The sheriff is the keeper of the jail of his county, and may appoint one of his deputies jailer. Article 5116. He is responsible for the official acts of his deputies. Article 6870. So far as the public is concerned, there is no difference between the official acts of the sheriff and those of his deputies. Heye & Co. v. Moody, 67 Tex. 615 , 4 S.W. 242 ; Rogers v. The Marshal, 1 Wall. 644 , 17 L.Ed. 714 . See, also, note in 1 ALR 222 , 236. As it was the official duty of Ramsay as deputy sheriff and jailer to keep all prisoners safely, it follows necessarily that it was a breach of that official duty and an abuse of his authority to injure or kill a prisoner without justifiable cause or legal excuse. ‘The character of the act, whether official or not, does not depend upon its lawfulness, but upon the fact that the person who performs it is in fact an officer and purports to act in his official capacity and does act by virtue of authority conferred by law.’ King v. Brown, 100 Tex. 109 , 94 S.W. 328, 330 . See, also, Myers v. Colquitt (Tex.Civ.App.) 173 S.W. 933 [993]. According to the undisputed evidence, Ramsay killed Bracken without justification or excuse. .”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Dean v. Gladney
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.