Johnson v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1981
Citation profile
23 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 23 later decisions — most recently February 2008
23 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 Jackson v. Denno · Culombe v. Connecticut · Bram v. United States · Sims v. State of Georgia · United States v. Brown
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 23 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“When an appellate court reviews a trial judge’s determination of voluntariness, its standard of review reflects the mixed factual and legal nature of the voluntariness inquiry. The voluntariness inquiry involves three steps. First, the trial judge must find the external, phenomenological facts surrounding the confession. Second, from these external facts, the judge must infer an internal psycho logical fact: the mental state of the accused. Finally, the judge must assess the legal significance of this inferred mental state. The first step of the inquiry, determining historical fact, is a pure fact-finding task requiring weighing the credibility of witnesses. Therefore, the appellate court must defer to a trial judge’s findings of historical fact and overturn them only if they are clearly erroneous. However, the appellate court has a duty to examine the entire record and make its own independent determinations as to the mental state of the accused and its legal significance. These determinations are to be based on the totality of the circumstances surrounding the confession.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. MacAuly v. State“Judicial determination of the voluntariness of confessions involves a unique process. This process has been described as requiring the trial court to apply a three-phased analysis. The court first determines what happened — whether a confession was made and what the basic circumstances surrounding it were. Next the court must decide by means of inference what the effect of the factual circumstances upon the mental state of the accused actually was. And, finally, from its decision as to the accused’s state of mind the court must draw its ultimate conclusion as to the voluntariness, in a legal sense, of his confession. [Footnotes and citations omitted.]”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Van Cleve v. State
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.