119 Cal. App. 82 - People v. Beesly’s Empirical Analysis
1931
Citation profile
95 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 95 later decisions — most recently June 2001 · most notably 48 Cal. 2d 394 - People v. Marshall (1957), 71 Cal. App. 2d 606 - People v. Gordon (1945)
95 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Relies on People v. King · 104 Cal. App. 431 - People v. Sampsell · 88 Cal. App. 575 - People v. Plum · 93 Cal. App. 42 - People v. Kuder · 40 Cal. App. 614 - The People v. Bonfanti
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 95 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““ ‘The sufficiency of an indictment or information is not to be tested by the rules of the common law nor by the rules which existed prior to the amendments of 1927 and 1929 of our statutes relating to the pleading in criminal eases. The true rule can be determined only by a consideration of all the statutes affecting the subject as they exist since these amendments. The purpose of an indictment or information is to inform the accused of the charge which he must meet at the trial. At common law, where this information came solely from the indictment, much particularity was required ... as a part of the accusatory procedure the law now provides that in every case the accused is entitled to a copy of the testimony given before the grand jury or the committing magistrate as the case may be (§§ 870, 925, Penal Code) and he is today better informed as to the case he must meet than was an accused under the detailed form of pleading required at common law. By section 959 of the Penal Code as amended in 1927 (Stats. 1927, p. 1041) we have the statutory provision that an information, indictment or complaint is sufficient if it can be understood therefrom that it is entitled in a court having authority to receive it; that the defendant is named, . . .; that the offense is one of which the court has jurisdiction and that the offense was committed prior to the filing of the information. The former requirements of subdivisions 6 and 7 of section 959, that the act or omission charged must ”
1 later decision quote this exact passage““Section 952, which formerly required the pleading to set forth the particular circumstances of the offense charged, as amended, declares that it shall be sufficient if it be ‘in any words sufficient to give the accused notice of the offense of which he is accused.’ There, in a nutshell, is stated the principle of our present simplified form of pleading of a criminal offense—the accused is entitled to notice of the offense of which he is charged but not to the particular circumstances thereof, such details being furnished him by the transcript of the testimony upon which the indictment or information is founded.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.