MacKey v. State’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

4 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 4 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “Now, what I think is an important point, and I will—I will bring that up several times during my questioning you, the point being we are not going to attempt to show that he intended to kill this baby. We’re going to attempt and we think we can show that he either intended to cause serious bodily injury or he was in the course of committing another felony, that being injury to a child, and he did an act clearly dangerous to human life that caused his death. Now, injury to a child is the felony that we maintain he was in the course of committing at the time. To commit injury to a child, the law allows us to show, and the law requires us to show—well, let me first say that injury to a child is what’s call a result-oriented crime—no, I’m sorry, it’s a conduct-oriented crime rather than a result-oriented crime. You intended to cause the conduct, not necessarily you intended to cause the result. And you can commit injury to a child either knowingly, intentionally or recklessly. We maintain that that’s an important part of it when we’re talking about children, and that will be defined to you also. Basically, a chdd is 14 years of age or under, has not reached its 15th birthday. No question here; the child further fits that definition there because the child hadn’t reached its third birthday. You can commit murder of a child and — and— commit murder of a child by acting recklessly. You don’t have to act knowingly; you don’t have to act intentionally, and you only have to act, the co”

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