Talk:Harmless error
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[edit]209.147.120.110 (talk) 02:50, 18 March 2008 (UTC)can someone explain harmless error to me in lamemen's terms because it is really confusing and im doing a government project on arizona v. fulminante which deals with that and i dont get it:(
standard
[edit]Can someone knowledgeable on the subject (with sources) say more about the standard used to determine if error is harmless, either in federal cases or various state cases? Does it differ? Is there a definitive U.S. Supreme Court pronouncement on the subject? The article currently somewhat vaguely mentions a standard that an error isn't harmless if: "on the balance of probabilities, [the case would have] resulted in the opposite determination of fact". It then quotes a somewhat different standard from the Wyoming Supreme Court that an error isn't harmless if: "a reasonable possibility exists that, in the absence of the error, the verdict might have been more favorable to the accused". --Delirium (talk) 17:02, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
- A seminal case on the harmless error standard is Chapman v. California, 386 U.S. 18 (1967). Another good case is Fahy v. State of Connecticut, 375 U.S. 85 (1963). A more modern case is Arizona v. Fulminante, 499 U.S. 279 (1991). I know the prior post is three years old, but my hope is someone can use this information to rewrite this article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Elreynolds04 (talk • contribs) 01:35, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
Constitutional harmless error
[edit]I created a redirect for "constitutional harmless error," but I want to flag that these are not really the same thing. Harmless error and constitutional harmless error are related concepts, but they are different enough that they would have different articles in an ideal world. The main reason is that they address different problems and have different approaches. Harmless error is, comparatively, straightforward because it addresses generic statute-based rights and applies mostly the same to any relevant violation. Constitutional harmless error (and its actual sibling, structural error) analyses are very, very different based on the specific right that was violated because they are based on the contours of the rights. The complexities of one are not the complexities of the other. This also makes any article on either topic an extremely difficult proposition, so I wouldn't bet on either being well-explained in the future. lethargilistic (talk) 16:21, 18 December 2025 (UTC)