Stokes v. Bullins’s Empirical Analysis
844 F.2d 269 · 1988
Citation profile
34 federal appellate · 1 district · 2 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 52 later decisions — most recently July 2015 · most notably Jones v. City of Chicago (1988), Snyder v. Trepagnier (1998)
34 federal appellate · 1 district · 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
Applies 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (Civil Rights Act of 1871 / Section 1983 (Ku Klux Klan Act)) · 42 U.S.C. § 1986
Relies on Monell v. Department of Social Services of City of New York · Monroe v. Pape · Pembaur v. City of Cincinnati · City of Oklahoma City v. Tuttle · City of St. Louis v. Praprotnik
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 52 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[w]e ... require a plaintiff [in cases such as this] to establish actual knowledge of the seriously deficient character of an applicant or a persistent, widespread pattern of the hiring of policemen, for instance, with a background of unjustified violence.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“mere negligence will not ultimately be a sufficient basis for § 1983 municipal liability”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[T]he type of “policy” upon which respondent relies and its causal relation to the alleged constitutional violation are not susceptible to such easy proof. In the first place, the word “policy” generally implies a course of action consciously chosen from among various alternatives; it is therefore difficult in one sense even to accept the submission that someone pursues a “policy” of “inadequate training”, unless evidence be adduced which proves that the inadequacies resulted from the conscious choice — that is, proof that the policy makers deliberately chose a training program which would prove inadequate. And in the second place, some limitation must be placed on establishing municipal liability through policies that are not themselves unconstitutional, or the test set out in Monell will become a dead letter ... ****** Proof of a single incident of an unconstitutional activity is not sufficient to impose liability under Monell , unless proof of the incident includes proof that it was caused by an existing, unconstitutional municipal policy, which policy can be attributed to a municipal policy maker otherwise the existence of the unconstitutional policy and its origin, must be separately proved. But where the policy relied upon is not itself unconstitutional, considerably more proof than the single incident will be necessary in every case to establish both the requisite fault on the part of the municipality, and the causal connection between the “policy” and the constitution”
1 later decision 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.