Ross v. State’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

7 state decisions

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 7 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““The plaintiff in error contends' that under this Act the unlawful imprisonment must be charged to have been committed with intent to cause the person imprisoned to be secretly confined or imprisoned in this State against his will, or to be sent out of the State against his will, and that an offense under this Act is not well charged without alleging this intent. The counsel for the State insists that the Statute of 1868' provides for punishing the offense of an unlawful imprisonment as a distinct offense; and that an imprisonment or confinement with intent, etc., is' another distinct offense, and that the copulative word ‘and’ after the words ‘against his will’ where it first occurs, may be construed as referring to another offense defined in the words which follow it. “The statute of Massachusetts (from which our law was copied) has the disjunctive ‘or’ instead of ‘and’ and yet the Courts of that State understood the whole of the preceding words as referring to the intent to, kidnap. (Com., v. Blodgett, and another, 12 Metcalf 56). The Legislature of this State by the use of the word ‘and’ instead of ‘or’ has indicated beyond question that the same construction should be placed upon it; and by leaving the law of 1932 unrepealed (which punishes the crime of false imprisonment as a misdemeanor only) it is clear that it was not intended to punish every unlawful confinement or restraint of another as a felony.””

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Holroyd v. State · Gordon v. State