Case Citator › Stovall v. Denno

Stovall v. Denno

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
388 U.S. 293
Decided
Confirmed treatments
1
Flagged citations read
239 of 239
Citing cases (total)
6,065
Treatment dates
1987
Overruled in part
A reviewed court has overruled part of this case’s holding. Stovall v. Denno has been overruled in part: all 239 flagged citations have been read, and the confirmed treatment is listed below. Griffith v. Kentucky rejected Stovall's case-specific retroactivity analysis for criminal cases pending on direct review and required all new criminal-procedure rules to apply to nonfinal cases.
More on how this was screened

Stovall's separate totality-of-the-circumstances due-process rule for unnecessarily suggestive identification procedures remains live; the reviewed identification cases continued to apply it, often alongside Neil v. Biggers, Manson v. Brathwaite, and Perry v. New Hampshire. The other nearby treatment language concerned different precedent or merely reported Griffith's treatment of Stovall.

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.

6,065 later cases cite Stovall v. Denno; 239 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 Stovall v. Denno?

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 rejected Stovall's case-specific retroactivity factors for cases pending on direct review and replaced them with categorical retroactivity for new criminal-procedure rules in nonfinal cases.

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

    The Court recognized in United States v. Johnson that the fact that a new rule is a clear break with the past is relevant primarily because it implicates the second and third Stovall factors of reliance by law enforcement officials and the burden on the administration of justice imposed by retroactive application. But even if these factors may be useful in deciding whether convictions that already have become final should receive the benefit of a new rule, the “clear break” exception, derived from the Stovall factors, reintroduces precisely the type of case-specific analysis that Justice Harlan rejected as inappropriate for cases pending on direct review.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

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