harmless error
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 328 U.S. 750 - Kotteakos v. United States · 1946Most cited · 15,058 citing opinions
if one cannot say, with fair assurance, after pondering all that happened without stripping the erroneous action from the whole, that the judgment was not substantially swayed by the error, it is impossible to conclude that substantial rights were not affected. The inquiry cannot be merely whether there was enough to support the result, apart from the phase affected by the error. It is rather, even so, whether the error itself had substantial influence. If so, or if one is left in grave doubt, the conviction cannot stand.
How the Supreme Court has restated “harmless error”
Each Supreme Court definition of “harmless error,” sized by how often later courts cited it. “Change” is measured by wording overlap with earlier definitions — a rough signal, not a semantic judgment.
How often courts cite the cases defining “harmless error”
Court decisions citing the 3 opinions that defined “harmless error” — 18,484 in all, by decade. Counts are citations to the defining cases as a whole, not verified uses of the term. The dip in the most recent years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the latest years.
All 3 definitions, chronological · 1916–1963
- ORIGINAL
A judgment is not to be reversed for an error by which the plaintiff in error cannot have been prejudiced.
The question is whether there is a reasonable possibility that the evidence complained of might have contributed to the conviction.