Smith v. People’s Empirical Analysis
1949
Citation profile
25 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 25 later decisions — most recently February 1995 · most notably Leick v. People (1958), Tate v. People (1952)
25 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 Dockerty v. People · Jones v. People · State v. Schneider · Carter v. People · Turley v. People
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 25 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““This court is committed to the rule that ‘one who, in the opinion of the trial court, shows adequate means of becoming acquainted with the person whose mental condition is in issue, after detailing the facts and circumstances concerning his acquaintance and the acts, conduct, and conversation upon which his conclusion is based, may give his opinion on the question of sanity .... “. . . Furthermore, the opinion of such non-expert is admissible only when it is made to appear that his acquaintanceship with the defendant had the requisite nearness in time after the act in issue which would properly move the sound discretion of the court to receive it. . . .””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. People v. Medina“"* * * The only answer to this question is that the law as declared and interpreted over many years is well established, and our function is to declare the law as we find it. If a change in long established judicial precedent is desirable, it is a legislative and not a judicial function to make any needed change. * * *"”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.