selective enforcement
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 368 U.S. 448 - Oyler v. Boles · 1962Most cited · 3,415 citing opinions
The conscious exercise of some selectivity in enforcement of a criminal statute is not in itself a federal constitutional violation; to state an equal protection claim based on selective enforcement, a petitioner must allege that the selection was deliberately based upon an unjustifiable standard such as race, religion, or other arbitrary classification — statistics showing a high percentage of eligible offenders not prosecuted, without more, do not establish a denial of equal protection.
How often courts cite the case defining “selective enforcement”
Court decisions citing the opinion that defined “selective enforcement” — 3,414 in all, by decade. Counts are citations to the defining case 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.