Case Citator › Sullivan v. Louisiana

Sullivan v. Louisiana

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
508 U.S. 275
Decided
Confirmed treatments
4
Flagged citations read
131 of 131
Citing cases (total)
131
Treatment dates
1997–2007
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. Sullivan v. Louisiana is limited: all 131 flagged citations have been read, and four confirmed adverse treatments are listed below. The courts confined Sullivan's structural-error rule in later cases and refused to extend it to questions outside its holding.
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.

131 later cases cite Sullivan v. Louisiana; 131 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 Sullivan v. Louisiana?

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 district court rejected extending Sullivan's no-verdict logic to the complete omission of one offense element and subjected that error to harmless-error review.

    United States v. Capati · S.D. California · filed

    Defendants and some panels of the Ninth Circuit have extended this logic to cases where the court completely fails to instruct the jury on an element, rather than where a court instructs the jury that the element is satisfied as a matter of law. ... Accordingly, the Court rejects Defendants' argument that it must grant a new trial without resort to harmless-error analysis.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

  • The Supreme Court confined Sullivan's holding to errors that vitiate all jury findings and rejected Sullivan's broader no-complete-verdict reasoning as inconsistent with its harmless-error cases.

    Neder v. United States · Supreme Court of the United States · filed

    Although this strand of the reasoning in Sullivan does provide support for Neder's position, it cannot be squared with our harmless-error cases.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

  • The Supreme Court held that failure to submit a sentencing factor to the jury is not structural error and rejected a broad reading of Sullivan that would foreclose harmless-error review whenever the jury returned no complete verdict.

    Washington v. Recuenco · Supreme Court of the United States · filed

    We recognized in Neder, however, that a broad interpretation of our language from Sullivan is inconsistent with our case law. 527 U. S., at 11-15. Because the jury in Neder, as here, failed to return a complete verdict of guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, our rejection of Neder's proposed application of the language from Sullivan compels our rejection of this argument here.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

  • The Alabama Supreme Court refused to extend Sullivan's no-valid-verdict reasoning beyond harmless-error review to nullify a verdict for double-jeopardy purposes.

    Ex parte Gillentine · Supreme Court of Alabama · filed

    The State, however, seeks to extend Sullivan and establish a rule that the presence of a structural error in the trial proceedings means that there has been no jury verdict at all, for any purpose. We disagree. First, the Sullivan Court did not hold that there had been no actual jury verdict; instead, Sullivan held that within the context of whether harmless-error review could be applied, there had been no jury verdict of guilty beyond a reasonable doubt as required by the Sixth Amendment.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

Does this case still carry your argument?

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