Brecht v. Abrahamson’s Empirical Analysis
944 F.2d 1363 · 1991
Citation profile
25 federal appellate · 1 district · 2 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 41 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently December 2015 · most notably Brecht v. Abrahamson (1993), Mills v. Jordan (1992)
25 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.
Appellate journey
Relationships
Relies on Miranda v. State of Arizona Vignera · Chapman v. State of California · In the Matter of Samuel Winship · United States v. Leon · Kotteakos v. United States
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 41 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““[In] Jenkins v. Anderson, 447 U.S. 231, 235-39 , 100 S. Ct. 2124, 2127-30 , 65 L. Ed. 2d 86 (1980), [the United States Supreme Court] *** held that use of silence to impeach a testifying defendant does not violate the self-incrimination clause of the federal Bill of Rights. Turning to the due process inquiry, the court observed that prosecutors may use as impeachment silence preceding the delivery of the warnings required by Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 , 86 S. Ct. 1602 , 16 L. Ed. 2d 694 (1966). See Fletcher v. Weir, 455 U.S. 603 , 102 S. Ct. 1309 , 71 L. Ed. 2d 490 (1982). *** ‘Common law traditionally has allowed witnesses to be impeached by their previous failure to state a fact in circumstances in which that fact naturally would have been asserted. Each jurisdiction may formulate its own rules of evidence to determine when prior silence is so inconsistent with present statements that impeachment by reference to such silence is probative.’ Jenkins, 447 U.S. at 239 , 100 S. Ct. at 2129 (citations omitted). If Brecht indeed shot [his brother-in-law] by accident, he had every reason to tell the police early and often. How else was he to win release from prison — or to ensure that investigators preserved evidence that would support his version of events? Why would an innocent man keep his sister in the dark about the circumstances of her husband’s death? Would he not at least apologize for the accident? Silence supports an inference that it took Brecht a while to cook up”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Doyle is . . . a prophylactic rule designed to protect another prophylactic rule from erosion or misuse.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrencee.g. Brecht v. Abrahamson“the error 'had substantial and injurious effect or influence in determining the jury's verdict.'”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrencee.g. Samuels v. Mann
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.