United States v. Webster’s Empirical Analysis
606 F.2d 581 · 1979
Citation profile
14 federal appellate · 1 district · 1 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 17 later decisions — most recently March 2012
14 federal appellate · 1 district · 1 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 Roviaro v. United States · United States v. Russell · Sorrells v. United States · Sherman v. United States · United States v. Gomez-Rojas
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 17 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[I]t was not at the time we adopted our rule, nor has it ever been, the law that the focus in entrapment decisions is primarily on the character of the government conduct involved. The quality of that conduct has always been viewed by the high Court as a secondary consideration. As the Supreme Court teaches in Russell, supra at 428-32, 93 S.Ct. 1637 , the notion that government conduct was the primary or sole consideration has from the first — since the Court recognized that defense in Sorrells v. United States, 287 U.S. 435 , 53 S.Ct. 210 , 77 L.Ed. 413 (1932) — been a minority view on the Court. Predisposition of the defendant is now and always has been the first consideration. Nor is it necessarily so that with Russell predisposition, having once been a secondary consideration, became the sole one. The Russell Court’s opinion speaks of nonpredisposition as “the principal element in the defense,” id. 411 U.S. at 439 , 93 S.Ct. at 1643 , which seems to imply that there are subsidiary ones. And elsewhere, the Russell Court hypothesizes government conduct so outrageous that it may constitute a defense. Id. at 431 , 93 S.Ct. 1637 . Our circuit’s authorities have long considered both the predisposition of the defendant and the character of the conduct of government agents to be material to the entrapment defense. Washington v. United States, 275 F.2d 687 , 689 (5th Cir. 1960); Accardi v. United States, 257 F.2d 168 , 172-73 (5th Cir. 1959). In the latter opinion cited, our panel”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“to avoid the conclusion, that counsel preferred, as a tactical choice, to denounce [the informant's] absence [rather] than to secure [the informant's] presence.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
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.