Our two most recent posts have utilized statistics from a Vanderbilt Law Review article in order to compare certain types of Wisconsin Supreme Court rulings with the decisions filed by other state supreme courts.^[1]  The law review article reached a number of conclusions that seem provocative when measured against Wisconsin’s experience, and this post addresses another such finding.

Nationwide, the article observed, publicly-funded lawyers (public defenders and publicly-funded private-bar lawyers taken together) were approximately twice as likely to obtain favorable results in state supreme courts as were private attorneys in cases that met the study’s criteria: no capital cases, no appeals filed by the State rather than by defendants, and no misdemeanors.  This post will determine whether the same can be said of Wisconsin.[Continue Reading…]

Last month’s post made use of a forthcoming article (“State Criminal Appeals Revealed”) in the Vanderbilt Law Review, which presented findings from a national dataset on criminal appeals resolved in 2010 by state supreme courts and lower appellate courts throughout the nation.  Regarding state supreme courts, the authors (Michael Heise, Nancy J. King, and Nicole Heise) extracted a representative sample of 1,425 cases in which defendants sought review.  From these 1,425 cases, review was granted in 89, and it was this subset of 89 cases that provided a national “standard” or “average” against which we measured decisions filed by the Wisconsin Supreme Court in cases that met the criteria specified by the authors of the law review article: no capital cases, no appeals filed by the State rather than by defendants, and no misdemeanors.

After directing our attention last month to the frequency with which defendants received favorable decisions from the Wisconsin Supreme Court compared to state supreme courts nationwide, we now take a closer look at the data by dividing the cases into several categories of crimes.  The crimes in question here are the “original” or underlying crimes alleged to have been committed—as distinct from the issues before the supreme courts (which might center on any number of other things, such as the admissibility of evidence, ineffective assistance of counsel, or the jury-selection process).  From 2004-05 through 2016-17 the Wisconsin Supreme Court decided 163 cases fitting the criteria described above, and, in Table 1, I have divided these cases into the categories of crimes selected by the authors of the law review article.^[1]  (The year 2010 did not yield enough decisions in Wisconsin to populate several categories in the table, so I drew Wisconsin’s decisions from the same 13-year interval covered in the previous post.)[Continue Reading…]

A forthcoming article (“State Criminal Appeals Revealed”) in the Vanderbilt Law Review furnishes the impetus for today’s post on felony appeals in the Wisconsin Supreme Court.  Utilizing a dataset released recently by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Center for State Courts—described in the law review article as “the first and only publicly available national dataset on state criminal appeals”—the authors (Michael Heise, Nancy J. King, and Nicole Heise) derived their information from a random, “nationally representative probability sample of criminal appeals resolved in 2010” by state supreme courts and lower appellate courts across the nation.^[1][Continue Reading…]

These tables are derived from information contained in 133 Wisconsin Supreme Court decisions that were turned up in a Lexis search for decisions filed between September 1, 1982, and August 31, 1983.  The total of 133 decisions does not include rulings arising from (1) disciplinary proceedings against lawyers, and (2) various motions and petitions.  Nor does the total include State ex rel. James Sykes v. Circuit Court for Milwaukee County, in which review was dismissed on grounds of mootness.

Also excluded are (1) In the Matter of Implementation of Felony Sentencing Guidelines, and (2) Report of Committee to Review the State Bar.  These were actions without case numbers, briefing, or oral argument and that resulted in per curiam decisions.

The tables are available as a complete set and by individual topic in the subsets listed below.

Four-to-Three Decisions
Decisions Arranged by Vote Split
Frequency of Justices in the Majority
Distribution of Opinion Authorship
Frequency of Agreement Between Pairs of Justices
Average Time Between Oral Argument and Opinions Authored by Each Justice
Number of Oral Arguments Presented by Individual Firms and Agencies

We now have opinions by two new justices and decisions from three more terms (2014-15 through 2016-17) to add to our initial discussion of Fourth Amendment cases, so it’s time for an update.^[1]   A number of recent developments are noteworthy, including the growing portion of the docket devoted to Fourth Amendment cases, which represented a larger percentage of the court’s cases during the past three years than in any other three-year period of the 22 terms under consideration.  As shown in Table 1, the 2016-17 term surpassed all others in this regard, when 18% of the court’s decisions addressed Fourth Amendment arguments, and the second highest figure (15%) was recorded in 2014-15.  In broader perspective, the six highest percentages all came during the last nine terms, when the court’s share of Fourth Amendment cases (10%) doubled the average for the previous 13 terms.^[2][Continue Reading…]

These tables are derived from information contained in 118 Wisconsin Supreme Court decisions that were turned up in a Lexis search for decisions filed between September 1, 1983, and August 31, 1984.  The total of 118 decisions does not include rulings arising from (1) disciplinary proceedings against lawyers and judges, and (2) various motions and petitions.

In re Judicial Administration: Felony Sentencing Guidelines, a per curiam decision in which the court declined an invitation from the legislature to issue felony sentencing guidelines, is not included in any of the following tables.  This action had no case number, and there was no briefing or oral argument.

The tables are available as a complete set and by individual topic in the subsets listed below.

Four-to-Three Decisions
Decisions Arranged by Vote Split
Frequency of Justices in the Majority
Distribution of Opinion Authorship
Frequency of Agreement Between Pairs of Justices
Average Time Between Oral Argument and Opinions Authored by Each Justice
Number of Oral Arguments Presented by Individual Firms and Agencies

After a decade and a half of relatively frequent turnover, the supreme court’s membership did not change from 2008-09 through 2014-15.  During these seven terms, the justices were often placed along a spectrum that included two “liberals” (Justices Abrahamson and Ann Walsh Bradley) and three “conservatives” (Justices Roggensack, Ziegler, and Gableman), with the remaining justices (Crooks and Prosser) situated between these two groups, but closer to the “conservatives.”

Over the next two years, though, the death of Justice Crooks and the retirement of Justice Prosser brought two new justices (Rebecca Bradley and Daniel Kelly) to the court—and raised the question of how their voting has compared with that of the justices whom they replaced.  Have they occupied roughly the same position on the spectrum as Justices Crooks and Prosser, or has their presence contributed to significant changes in the court’s voting patterns?  Posts currently under consideration may explore this question with regard to specific issues or categories of cases, but today we offer a broader examination of the four justices’ votes.[Continue Reading…]

These tables are derived from information contained in 83 Wisconsin Supreme Court decisions that were turned up in a Lexis search for decisions filed between September 1, 1984, and August 31, 1985.  The total of 83 decisions does not include rulings arising from (1) disciplinary proceedings against lawyers and judges, and (2) various motions and petitions.

In addition to the 83 cases mentioned above, there was also a 4-3 per curiam decision (State v. Gustafson).  It is included only in the opinion authorship table (because Justice Abrahamson wrote a dissent) and in the oral argument table.

The tables are available as a complete set and by individual topic according to the subsets listed below.

Four-to-Three Decisions
Decisions Arranged by Vote Split
Frequency of Justices in the Majority
Distribution of Opinion Authorship
Frequency of Agreement Between Pairs of Justices
Average Time Between Oral Argument and Opinions Authored by Each Justice
Number of Oral Arguments Presented by Individual Firms and Agencies

Last August, a SCOWstats post examined three aspects of the just-completed 2015-16 term: (1) the number of concurrences and dissents per decision, (2) the number of days between oral argument and decision filing, and (3) the number of pages per decision.  In all three instances the post reported a sizeable increase over the numbers from 2014-15, and today we return to these topics to determine how 2016-17 measures up against 2015-16.[Continue Reading…]

These tables are derived from information contained in 50 Wisconsin Supreme Court decisions filed between September 1, 2016, and the end of the court’s term in July, 2017.^[1]  The total of 50 decisions does not include the following items contained in the Supreme Court’s listing of opinions and dispositional orders for this period: (1) decisions arising from bar-admission issues and disciplinary proceedings against lawyers; and (2) orders pertaining to various motions and petitions.

Maya Elaine Smith v. Jeff Anderson, which resulted in a 3-2 per curiam decision that review had been improvidently granted, is not included.

Sometimes the Court’s listing of opinions and dispositional orders contains separate entries for individual cases that were consolidated and resolved by a single decision.  If two or more cases were consolidated in this manner, the decision is counted only once for the purposes of the following tables. 

In addition to the 50 decisions noted above, a deadlocked (3-3) per curiam decision was filed in Scott Smith v. Greg Kleynerman.  This is included only in the “Number of Oral Arguments Presented” table. 

The tables are available as a complete set and by individual topic according to the subsets listed below.

Four-to-Three Decisions
Decisions Arranged by Vote Split
Frequency of Justices in the Majority
Distribution of Opinion Authorship
Frequency of Agreement Between Pairs of Justices
Average Time Between Oral Argument and Opinions Authored by Each Justice
Number of Oral Arguments Presented by Individual Firms and Agencies

[1] According to the Clerk’s office, no additional substantive decisions will be filed after July 7.  The decisions may be found on the Wisconsin Court System website.