Yesterday, we showed that affirmances in civil cases between 2008 and 2016 have tended to be pending for longer both between the grant of review and oral argument, and between argument and decision, than reversals were. Today, we address the Court's criminal cases between 2008 and 2016.
Our database contains 304 affirmances and 209 reversals. Affirmances have averaged 2,255.743 days from allowance of the petition for leave to appeal to oral argument, but only 1,117.471 days for reversals from allowance to argument. The standard deviation for affirmances from allowance to argument was 1,732.426 days, suggesting that a not-insubstantial portion of the Court's criminal docket were pending for as little as 520 days from grant to argument. The standard deviation for reversals was 1,404.52 days.
We report the average time from argument to decision in Table 182 below. This is the only measure for which reversals took slightly longer than affirmances – reversals averaged 74.148 days, while affirmances averaged 72.878 days. Interestingly, there's considerably more variation in the data for reversals than there is or affirmances. The standard deviation for affirmances is 17.219, while the standard deviation for reversals was 59.0584.
Join us back here on Tuesday as we address another aspect of the lag time data.
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