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