Farrow v. State’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

6 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 6 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “A child is one year old on the first anniversary of his birth and is sixteen years old on the sixteenth anniversary. Before the sixteenth anniversary he is under the age of sixteen years and after that anniversary he is over the age of sixteen. Sixteen years is an exact and definite period of time. It does not mean or include sixteen years and six months. We should be realistic and not read something into the statute which is not there and which clearly was not intended to be there. This is a criminal statute and cannot be added to by strained construction. "Of the age sixteen years" must be construed to mean just what it says, i.e.; sixteen years and not sixteen years, six months and three days. If, speaking in terms of money, one were to say "The fee or charge will be fifteen dollars or under" there would be no possibility of misunderstanding. To say that sixteen years and six months means the same as sixteen years is to play loosely with words which have a definite meaning. It has been suggested that when one is asked to state his age he gives only the age at the latest anniversary of his birth and does not add the additional months and days which a completely correct statement would require, and this is cited as indicating it is commonly accepted that one is sixteen until his seventeenth birthday anniversary. All such arguments are unsound. When the legislature wrote "sixteen years" into the statute it intended the words to be construed according to their ordinary meaning”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. State v. Carroll · State v. Demby