Cross v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1953
Citation profile
46 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 52 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently April 2008 · most notably Green v. United States (1957), MacKall v. Commonwealth (1988)
46 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 Wheeler v. United States · Burnam v. Chicago Great Western Railroad · Rueger v. Hawks · Carpenter v. Commonwealth · 52 Cal. App. 765 - People v. Delaney
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 52 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“There is no specific age at which a child must have arrived in order to be competent as a witness. A child is competent to testify if it possesses the capacity to observe events, to recollect and communicate them, and has the ability to understand questions and to frame and make intelligent answers, with a consciousness of the duty to speak the truth.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“The competency of a child as a witness to a great extent rests in the sound discretion of the trial judge whose decision will not be disturbed unless the error is manifest. It is the duty of the trial judge to determine such competency after a careful examination of the child. In deciding the question the judge must consider the child’s age, his intelligence or lack of intelligence, and his sense of moral and legal responsibility.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority““[T]he intelligence, not the age, of a young child is the test of its competency as a witness; that is to say, to be considered competent, a child must be able to receive accurate impressions of the facts to which its testimony relates, and to relate truly the impressions received.”
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.