State v. Wilson’s Empirical Analysis
1889
Citation profile
12 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 12 later decisions — most recently August 1978
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 State v. Wieners · State v. Ellis · State v. Eaton · State v. Rider · State v. Snell
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.
““In homicide, an intent to kill is an essential element to make the offense murder in the first or second degree, and so the court instructed the jury in this case. [State v. Gassert, 65 Mo. 352 ; State v. Peak, 85 Mo. 190 .] Murder in the second degree, however, includes not only homicides with intent to kill, in the heat of passion caused by a provocation short of lawful provocation but that would naturally excite such heat, but also all those cases of murder at common law not declared by statute to be murder in the first degree or manslaughter; in which class is included cases where the act done is malicious and manifestly dangerous to human life and does produce death, although the intent may have been only to do great bodily harm. In such cases the law presumes the intent to kill. [State v. O’Hara, 92 Mo. 59 ; State v. Wieners, 66 Mo. 13 ; Wharton’s Crim. Law (8 Ed.), sec. 388.] The heat of passion that will take away the malice from the act thus manifestly dangerous to human life, and reduce the offense to manslaughter, must be caused by lawful provocation and as we have seen, there was no such provocation in this case.””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. State v. May““In a sense, every killing may be said to be cruel, and killings may be said to be unusual, but surely it was not in this sense the legislature used the terms, for, if so, they add no meaning to the section. It is not difficult to conceive the idea of a killing in the heat of passion that would be cruel or unusual, but within it would never be embraced the instance of one who in the heat of passion in the course of angry altercation struck a single fatal blow with an ordinary working implement which he had in his hand at the commencement and during the entire progress of the altercation.” (The State v. Wilson, 98 Mo. 440, 447 , 11 S. W. 985 , 987.)”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Knoll
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.