Commonwealth v. Kirkpatrick’s Empirical Analysis
1996
Citation profile
2 district · 46 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 52 later decisions — most recently April 2022 · most notably Commonwealth v. Grandison (2001), Commonwealth v. King (2005)
2 district · 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 51 Cal. 3d 294 - People v. Jones · Commonwealth v. Flebotte · Kogan v. People · Commonwealth v. King · Commonwealth v. Williams
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.
“"[W]e reject the contention that jury unanimity is necessarily unattainable where testimony regarding repeated identical offenses is presented in child molestation cases. In such cases, although the jury may not be able to readily distinguish between the various acts, it is certainly capable of unanimously agreeing that they took place in the number and manner described. "As previously stated, even generic testimony describes a repeated series of specific, though indistinguishable, acts of molestation. The unanimity instruction assists in focusing the jury's attention on each such act related by the victim and charged by the People. We see no constitutional impediment to allowing a jury, so instructed, to find a defendant guilty of more than one indistinguishable act, providing the three minimum prerequisites heretofore discussed are satisfied. "For example, if the victim testified that an act of oral copulation occurred once each month for the first three months of 1990, and the People charge three counts of molestation, the jury's unanimous conclusion that these three acts took place would satisfy the constitutional requirement of unanimity. "Similarly, if an information charged two counts of lewd conduct during a particular time period, the child victim testified that such conduct took place three times during that same period, and the jury believed that testimony in toto, its difficulty in differentiating between the various acts should not preclude a conviction of the tw”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“a jury will either believe that a consistent and repetitive pattern of abuse has occurred, of necessity encompassing a number of discrete acts, or they will disbelieve it.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“reasonably detailed descriptions of various distinguishable forms of abuse,”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage
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.