Case Citator › Rochin v. California

Rochin v. California

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

Limited by some courts
Court
Supreme Court of the United States
Citation
342 U.S. 165
Decided
Confirmed treatments
3
Flagged citations read
136 of 136
Citing cases (total)
136
Treatment dates
1980–2015
Limited by some courts
At least one reviewed court has limited this case’s holding to narrower facts or a narrower rule. No reviewed court has overruled it. Rochin v. California has limited treatment: all 136 flagged citations have been read, and the 3 confirmed treatments are listed below.
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.

136 later cases cite Rochin v. California; 136 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 Rochin v. California?

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

Limited

  • The en banc court confined the Rochin line of due-process precedent to cases involving a physical assault on the suspect, while recognizing that other investigative conduct may fall within a broader due-process category.

    United States v. Penn · Ninth Circuit (en banc) · filed

    It was technically incorrect to rely on Rochin ; we have strictly limited the Rochin line of precedent to cases of physical assault on a suspect’s person.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

  • The Supreme Court confined Rochin's forced-evidence holding to the Fourth Amendment framework while preserving its result and its shock-the-conscience standard for other executive action.

    County of Sacramento v. Lewis · Supreme Court of the United States · filed

    Rochin, of course, was decided long before Graham v. Connor (and Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U. S. 643 (1961)), and today would be treated under the Fourth Amendment, albeit with the same result.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

  • The Fourth Circuit declined to extend Rochin's clearly established bodily-integrity rule beyond compelled evidence-gathering procedures to medically unnecessary sex-assignment surgery.

    M.C. v. Amrhein · Fourth Circuit · filed

    We find these cases too dissimilar to give the defendants fair notice of the alleged constitutional violation. Lee and Rochin involved medical procedures to secure evidence against individuals suspected of committing a crime. In Lee, the Court disapproved of a compelled surgical procedure to extract a bullet that could connect Lee to a robbery. 470 U.S. at 755. The Court in Rochin found shocking and unconstitutional three police officers’ struggle to open Rochin’s mouth to extract the capsules he had swallowed and, when that method proved unsuccessful, forced stomach pumping to retrieve the capsules. 342 U.S. at 166, 172. Neither of these cases, however, gave the defendants fair notice that they were violating M.C.’s right to bodily integrity by performing sex assignment surgery that M.C. contends was medically unnecessary.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

Does this case still carry your argument?

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