Case Citator › Johnson v. New Jersey

Johnson v. New Jersey

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

Overruled in part
Court
Supreme Court of the United States
Citation
384 U.S. 719
Decided
Confirmed treatments
2
Flagged citations read
101 of 101
Citing cases (total)
3,003
Treatment dates
1972–1987
Overruled in part
A reviewed court has overruled part of this case’s holding. Johnson v. New Jersey was overruled in part: all 101 flagged citations have been read, and the 2 confirmed treatments are listed below. Griffith v. Kentucky displaced Johnson's use of the Linkletter balancing method for cases pending on direct review by requiring every new criminal-procedure rule to apply to all nonfinal cases, while leaving Johnson's case-specific nonretroactivity result intact for convictions already final.
More on how this was screened

Commonwealth v. Fondoble separately declined to extend Johnson's retroactivity framework beyond court-made criminal-procedure rules to a statute held unconstitutional and void from inception. The other citing opinions followed or applied Johnson, reported another court's act, used nearby treatment language for unrelated precedent or trial rulings, or did not cite Johnson.

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.

3,003 later cases cite Johnson v. New Jersey; 101 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 Johnson v. New Jersey?

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

Overruled in part

  • The Supreme Court displaced Johnson's rule that the Linkletter balancing analysis governed both final convictions and cases pending on direct review; new criminal-procedure rules now apply to every nonfinal case, even when they make a clear break with past precedent.

    Griffith v. Kentucky · Supreme Court of the United States · filed

    Shortly after the decision in Linkletter, the Court held that the three-pronged analysis applied both to convictions that were final6 and to convictions pending on direct review. See Johnson v. New Jersey, 384 U. S. 719, 732 (1966); Stovall v. Denno, 388 U. S., at 300. In the latter case, the Court concluded that, for purposes of applying the three factors of the analysis, “no distinction is justified between convictions now final . . . and convictions at various stages of trial and direct review.” Ibid. ... We therefore hold that a new rule for the conduct of criminal prosecutions is to be applied retroactively to all cases, state or federal, pending on direct review or not yet final, with no exception for cases in which the new rule constitutes a “clear break” with the past.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

Limited

  • The court declined to extend Johnson's retroactivity framework for newly announced criminal-procedure rules to a due-process challenge against a statute that was unconstitutional and void ab initio.

    Commonwealth v. Fondoble · Lebanon County Court of Common Pleas · filed

    The argument is seated in those lines of developing case law on retroactivity in connection with constitutional rules of criminal procedure. See Linkletter v. Walker, 381 U.S. 618, 14 L. Ed. 2d 601, 85 S. Ct. 1731 (1965); Tehan v. U.S. 382 U.S. 406, 15 L. Ed. 2d 453, 86 S. Ct. 459 (1966); Johnson et al. v. New Jersey, 384 U.S. 719, 16 L. Ed. 2d 882, 86 S. Ct. 1772 (1966). But we are of the opinion that this constitutional concept is inapplicable to our controversy, as all of the cases espousing retroactivity as opposed to prospectivity dealt with rules of crimi*458nal procedure, and overruled prior court decisions directly on point.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

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