Case Citator › Dunn v. United States

Dunn v. United States

Is it still good law? What later courts have actually done to this case.

Criticized by some courts
Court
Supreme Court of the United States
Citation
284 U.S. 390
Decided
Confirmed treatments
1
Flagged citations read
66 of 66
Citing cases (total)
66
Treatment dates
1967
Criticized by some courts
At least one reviewed court has criticized this case’s reasoning. No reviewed court has overruled it. Dunn v. United States was criticized on one point of reasoning, while its rule permitting inconsistent verdicts was followed. The Second Circuit called Dunn's analogy between counts in one indictment and separately tried indictments mistaken; that treatment is listed below.
More on how this was screened

Indiana courts chose to review irreconcilable verdicts under their own law, as noted separately. The available text for all 66 flagged citing opinions was reviewed, but four opinions did not contain the indexed Dunn citation, leaving those citations unresolved. Review note: The available texts for Lambert v. United States (1494086), Clegg v. State (1177780), City of Los Angeles v. Heller (111630), and Haygood v. State (4989585) contained no Dunn citation or discussion. CourtListener's access rules prevented retrieval of another opinion version. No treatment was inferred from those four records. They count toward the progress total but were not substantively assessed.

Every treatment on this page is written from the citing opinion itself, with a verbatim quote, never copied from a commercial citator. A citation flagged by our screen but not shown here was read and found not to weaken this case.

66 later cases cite Dunn v. United States; 66 of those citations sat close to treatment language and were flagged for reading, and all of them have been read. Citations that did not sit near treatment language were not flagged and were not read one by one, so a court that weakened this case without using any of that language would not appear here.

Relying on Dunn v. United States?

This page shows what later courts did to it. Ask about your specific facts and see whether it still carries your argument, with citations you can check.

Treatments

Criticized

  • The Second Circuit called Dunn's analogy between separately tried indictments and counts tried together mistaken, while following Dunn's rule on inconsistent verdicts.

    United States v. Carbone · Second Circuit · filed

    The contention has the difficulty that, as was intimated in United States v. Maybury, 274 F.2d 899, 905 (2 Cir. 1960), it would necessarily have led Mr. Justice Holmes into a position precisely the opposite of what he took in Dunn. The escape from the dilemma lies in owning that in this, his last opinion, written in his ninety-first year, ... the Justice was mistaken in identifying the two situations, but that the argument was' in no way essential to his conclusion.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

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