Criminal procedure: Supreme Court cases

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Library edition words from U.S. Reports

Mapp, Brady, Katz and Terry: what the Supreme Court held, in the reporter’s own words.

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Words from
United States Reports, Library of Congress. Opinions and syllabi of the Supreme Court are U.S. government works, free to use.
Edition
United States Reports, vols. 367, 373, 389 and 392, as scanned by the Library of Congress, one PDF a case
Checked
Word for word against the source, on 17 October 2026.
How it was made
Each card is a case card, named by the case’s name with its citation and year.Its holding is one sentence of the case’s syllabus, as the PDF’s text gives it: running heads and page-foot notes are dropped, a word broken at a line end is joined, and the part’s number or letter and its page reference are left off.Its facts are the syllabus’s own statement of them, copied the same way, for the two cases whose syllabus has one the text reads cleanly.Parts the PDF’s text misreads are left out, never corrected, and each brief’s issue and rule are left for you to write.
Edited by
Aheadso chose the cards and set them out.Every word on them is the source’s.
On the shelf
Law, Criminal procedure · 4 cards

A syllabus is no part of the Court’s opinion.The Reporter of Decisions prepares it for the reader’s convenience (United States v. Detroit Timber & Lumber Co., 200 U.S. 321, 337).

The cards

  1. Mapp v. Ohio367 U.S. 643 (1961)Criminal procedureAll evidence obtained by searches and seizures in violation of the Federal Constitution is inadmissible in a criminal trial in a state court.
  2. Brady v. Maryland373 U.S. 83 (1963)Criminal procedureSuppression by the prosecution of evidence favorable to an accused who has requested it violates due process where the evidence is material either to guilt or to punishment, irrespective of the good faith or bad faith of the prosecution.
    FactsIn separate trials in a Maryland Court, where the jury is the judge of both the law and the facts but the court passes on the admissibility of the evidence, petitioner and a companion were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. At his trial, petitioner admitted participating in the crime but claimed that his companion did the actual killing. In his summation to the jury, petitioner's counsel conceded that petitioner was guilty of murder in the first degree and asked only that the jury return that verdict "without capital punishment." Prior to the trial, petitioner's counsel had requested the prosecution to allow him to examine the companion's extrajudicial statements. Several of these were shown to him; but one in which the companion admitted the actual killing was withheld by the prosecution and did not come to petitioner's notice until after he had been tried, convicted and sentenced and after his conviction had been affirmed by the Maryland Court of Appeals. In a post-conviction proceeding, the Maryland Court of Appeals held that suppression of the evidence by the prosecutor denied petitioner due process of law, and it remanded the case for a new trial of the question of punishment, but not the question of guilt, since it was of the opinion that nothing in the suppressed confession "could have reduced [petitioner's] offense below murder in the first degree."
  3. Katz v. United States389 U.S. 347 (1967)Criminal procedureThe Government's eavesdropping activities violated the privacy upon which petitioner justifiably relied while using the telephone booth and thus constituted a "search and seizure" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.
    FactsPetitioner was convicted under an indictment charging him with transmitting wagering information by telephone across state lines in violation of 18 U. S. C. § 1084. Evidence of petitioner's end of the conversations, overheard by FBI agents who had attached an electronic listening and recording device to the outside of the telephone booth from which the calls were made, was introduced at the trial. The Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction, finding that there was no Fourth Amendment violation since there was "no physical entrance into the area occupied by" petitioner.
  4. Terry v. Ohio392 U.S. 1 (1968)Criminal procedureThe Fourth Amendment applies to "stop and frisk" procedures such as those followed here.

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Every card here is copied word for word from its source.None of it is written by AI.