Kelley v. State’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

24 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 26 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““[I]t is not indispensable to a conviction, that the wounds were necessarily fatal, and were the direct cause of death. If they caused the death indirectly, through a chain of natural effects and causes, unchanged by human action, it is sufficient as to this point. The principle has been clearly and profoundly stated by Bar, an eminent German jurist, (Die Lehre von Causalzusammenhange, p. 11) as follows: “ ‘A man is, in the eye of the law, the cause of a phenomenon, when he is the condition by which the regular sequences of the phenomena of human life are changed.’ And we believe this proposition has been fully sustained by the supreme court (Obertribunal) of Prussia, but perhaps carried farther in its application than American authorities would warrant. But' the question has been long since carefully settled in England and America. Hawkins, in his Pleas of the Crown, vol. 1, p. 118, says: “ ‘In what cases a man may be said to kill another; not only he who by a wound or blow, or by poisoning, strangling, or famishing, etc., directly causes another’s death, but also in many cases, he who by wilfully and deliberately doing a thing which apparently endangers another’s life, thereby occasions his death, shall be adjudged to kill him.’ ” (Original emphasis.) Kelley v. State, (1876) 53 Ind. 315, 316 .”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Booker v. State