State v. Knighten’s Empirical Analysis
1901
Citation profile
12 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 12 later decisions — most recently October 1949
12 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 People v. Mayes · Sutton v. People · Boddie v. State · People v. Wessel · People v. Ah Yek
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 12 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““At common law, a boy under fourteen years of age was conclusively presumed to be physically incapable of committing the crime of rape, but it was never held that it was necessary to allege the age of the defendant in an indictment for that crime: 16 Am. & Eng. Ency. Law [1st Ed.] 315; Commonwealth v. Scannel, 11 Cush. 547 ; Sutton v. People, 145 Ill. 279 ( 34 N. E. 420 ); State v. Ward, 35 Minn. 182 (28 N W. 192). Nor is it necessary under the statute. If the defendant was below the requisite age, it is a matter of defense.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““It does not appear upon the face of the indictment that defendant was under fourteen years of age, and we see no better reason for averring that he is over fourteen than in any other criminal case for averring that the party charged is of such an age as to render him capable in law of committing the crime. His capacity to commit the crime is as much an element in the crime in one case as in the other.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. State v. Nesmith
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.