Smith v. United States’s Empirical Analysis
1988
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 30 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 32 later decisions — most recently July 2025 · most notably Graham v. State (1992), State v. Laney (2003)
2 federal appellate · 30 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 Ohio Bureau of Employment Services v. Hodory · Washington v. Confederated Bands & Tribes of the Yakima Indian Nation · Rogers v. United States · Bonanno v. United States · Bateman Eichler, Hill Richards, Inc. v. Berner
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 32 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“There is inevitably a risk of coercion whenever a jury is divided unevenly. Any effort by the court to persuade the jury to reach an agreement after reporting its numerical split . . . may be interpreted by the minority as an implied command to agree with the majority. . . . . . . . . . If the jury reasonably believes that the judge knows how it is divided, regardless of the judge's actual knowledge, any pressure by the judge to reach a verdict . . . will be understood by all jurors to be directed at the minority.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Cortez · State v. Cortez“[i]f the jury reasonably believes that the judge knows how it is divided, regardless of the judge's actual knowledge, any pressure by the judge to reach a verdict ... will be understood by all jurors to be directed at the minority.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“A defendant and his counsel have a right to be informed of all communications from the jury and to offer their reactions before the trial judge undertakes to respond.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
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.