Bruno v. Rushen’s Empirical Analysis
721 F.2d 1193 · 1983
Citation profile
33 federal appellate · 1 district · 23 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 74 later decisions — most recently December 2018 · most notably United States v. Pungitore (1990), United States v. Baker (1993)
33 federal appellate · 1 district · 23 state decisions — followed in 12 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
Relies on Chapman v. State of California · Gideon v. Wainwright · Powell v. State of Alabama Patterson · Berger v. United States · Doyle v. Ohio
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 74 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[... ] in no situation in a criminal trial such as this one do we feel the mere act of hiring an attorney is probative in the least of the guilt or innocence of defendants. Lawyers in criminal cases are necessities not luxuries, and even the most innocent individuals do well to retain counsel. Neither is it accurate to state that defense counsel, in general, act in underhanded and unethical ways, and absent specific evidence in the record, no particular defense counsel can be maligned. Even though such prosecutorial expressions of belief are only intended ultimately to impute guilt to the accused, not only are they invalid for that purpose, they also severely damage an accused’s opportunity to present his case before the jury. It therefore is an impermissible strike at the very fundamental due process protections that the Fourteenth Amendment has made applicable to ensure an inherent fairness in our adversarial system of criminal justice. Furthermore, such tactics unquestionably tarnish the badge of evenhandedness and fairness that normally marks our system of justice and we readily presume because the principle is so fundamental that all attorneys are cognizant of it. Any abridgment of its sanctity therefore seems particularly unacceptable.”
8 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[T]he prosecutor reviewed the testimony of an important witness for the defense that had repudiated earlier pro-prosecution statements she had given government investigators. He inferred that this sudden reversal at trial in her memory was the direct product of her consultation with the accused's attorney before she took the stand. He returned to this theme in the closing part of his argument. Thus, in hopes of destroying the credibility of her testimony on the stand, the prosecutor had labelled defense counsel's actions as unethical and perhaps even illegal without producing one shred of evidence to support his accusations.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Edwards v. Ylst · State v. Greiff“[bjecause the prosecutor is in a peculiar and very definite sense the servant of the law, the twofold aim of which is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer ..., [i]t is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate method to bring about one.”
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.