Last week, we completed our look at the Court’s majority opinions across the spectrum from civil to non-death criminal cases to the Court’s docket of mandatory death penalty appeals. With the constitutional challenge to the Proposition 66 death penalty referendum still pending before the California Supreme Court, let’s take a closer look at the Court’s
Yesterday, we looked at the distribution and average length of the Court’s majority opinions in criminal cases not involving the death penalty between 2008 and 2015. Today, we address the distribution of the Court’s most recent death penalty appeals.
Between 2008 and 2015, Justice Chin wrote the most majority opinions in death penalty cases with
For the past few weeks, we’ve been analyzing the distribution of majority opinions among the Justices in civil, criminal and death penalty cases, and which Justices tend to write the longest (and shortest) opinions. Today, we turn our attention to the Court’s criminal cases between 2008 and 2015. Once again, we omit the death penalty
Yesterday, we analyzed the Justices’ history with majority opinions in civil cases between 2000 and 2007. Today, we turn our attention to the Court’s history with majority opinions in automatic death penalty appeals. We separate out death penalty appeals from criminal cases in general because majority opinions in death penalty cases are nearly always considerably
Yesterday, we demonstrated that majority opinions have been getting somewhat longer on average in criminal cases at the California Supreme Court since 2007. Today, we turn our attention to the Court’s majority opinions in automatic death penalty appeals. These two inquiries are not entirely independent; yesterday we were working with overall criminal docket data, including
Last week, we began addressing trends in the length of the Court’s majority opinions, reviewing civil and criminal majority opinions between 2000 and 2007. Today, we turn our attention to the Court’s majority opinions in automatic death penalty appeals, with the data divided between non-unanimous and unanimous opinions.
As we show in Table 114 below,
Yesterday, we continued our examination of the Court’s voting patterns, dividing the Court’s unanimity rate among the automatic death penalty appeals and the criminal non-death cases, and asking how often in the death penalty and “everything else” dockets the Court’s decision was lopsided – meaning either unanimous or one dissenter. Today, we turn our attention
For the past few weeks, we’ve been looking further at the Court’s unanimity rate, dividing the Court’s docket into closely divided (2-3 dissenters) and lopsided decisions. This week, we’ll take a closer look at the Court’s criminal docket, dividing the Court’s decisions into the automatic death penalty appeals and criminal non-death decisions – in other
Today, we conclude our analysis of the areas of law comprising the California Supreme Court’s criminal docket.
In Table 82 below, we report the numbers of cases falling in each area of law from 2000 to 2015. Automatic death penalty appeals accounted for 331 of the Court’s 969 criminal cases. The Court decided 154 criminal
For the past six weeks, we’ve been analyzing the year-by-year evolution of the areas of law covered by the California Supreme Court’s civil and criminal dockets. I once read a quote from an appellate judge who commented that every jurisdiction completely restates its law every twenty years. Since our data library covers nearly that long