Earlier this week, we began analyzing the Illinois Supreme Court’s experience with automatic death penalty appeals. Yesterday, we began our review of the California Supreme Court’s record, beginning with the year 1994.
In Table 279, we review the Court’s partial and complete reversal rate for the years 2002 through 2009. In 2002, the Court affirmed
Earlier this week, we began our review of the Illinois Supreme Court’s record with death penalty appeals between 1990 and the abolition of the death penalty in 2011. Today and tomorrow, we’re comparing the California Supreme Court’s data on death penalty cases.
In Table 276, we report the number of death penalty appeals the Court
For the past several weeks, we’ve been comparing the Court’s lag times – time to oral argument, and then oral argument to decision – for affirmances as opposed to reversals. We’ve determined that affirmances tend to take longer from outset to argument than reversals do. The difference between affirmances and reversals is much greater for
We’ve been reviewing the data for lag time from grant of review to oral argument to decision in criminal cases, dividing the data up to separate non-death and death penalty appeals, searching for an explanation of why lag time for affirmances has been considerably longer than lag time for reversals between 2000 and 2007. Today,
For the past few weeks, we’ve been taking a close look at the California Supreme Court’s automatic death penalty appeals docket. Yesterday, we calculated the average time from appointment of counsel to the scheduled oral argument and looked at whether the total time under submission told us anything about what the ultimate result would be.
Last week, we continued our analysis of the California Supreme Court’s death penalty docket, tracing the number of cases which the Court decides every year, the fraction of the docket that’s decided unanimously, and the frequency with which the Court reverses in part or outright. Today we turn our attention to a controversial topic: how
Yesterday, we began our review of the California Supreme Court’s death penalty docket, looking at both the number of cases the Court decides each year, and its usual unanimity rate. Today, we turn our attention to a new question: what’s the reversal rate?
We must begin by defining our terms. As we showed earlier, death
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
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