State v. King’s Empirical Analysis
1974
Citation profile
17 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 17 later decisions — most recently April 2018
17 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 State v. Pullen · State v. Sawyer · State v. Harriman · State v. Farmer · State v. Call
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 17 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The fixing of an adequate [criminal] penalty is properly and legitimately a matter of legislative concern. It is not the office of the judiciary to interpose constitutional limitations where none need be found. Of course a mandatory sentence of great severity may at some point lose its rational relation to a permissible legislative purpose; a disparity between the sentence and the evil to be avoided might then be a cruelty of constitutional dimensions. It seems to us that the interest of the legislature is paramount in the field of penology and the public safety. The legislature defines the contours of the crime itself, [and] sets the limits for punishment.... The underlying structure of the penal system is statutory; the coherence of the system is to be found in legislative direction.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Benner · State v. Gilman
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.