Today we’re beginning a series of posts examining the declining dockets at the Court of Appeal and assessing the impact on the Supreme Court’s work.
Below, we report the District-by-District new Notices of Appeal numbers (civil, criminal and juvenile) for the years 1996 through 2000. All data comes from the California Courts Court Statistics Reports, which are available on the California Courts website.
Filings were comparatively steady in the First District. In Judicial Year 1995-1996, there were 2,864 new Notices of Appeal. That dropped to 2,726 in 1997 and 2,671 in 1998, but recovered to 2,698 in 1999 and 2,716 in 2000. Filings in the Second District increased from 1996 (6,548 new Notices of Appeal) to 1998 (6,709), but then dropped fairly sharply, to 6,262 in 1999 and 6,284 in 2000. Filings in the Third District were almost completely flat from 1996 to 1999 before dropping slightly in 2000. The story was the same in the Fourth District – filings flat from 1996 to 1998, then a drop from 4,604 in 1998 to 4,485 in 1999 and 4,284 in 2000. New Notices of Appeal in the Fifth and Sixth Districts remained at approximately the same level each year from 1996 to 2000.
Next time we’ll take a look at the data for new original proceedings for the same years.
Image courtesy of Flickr by Malcolm Carlaw (no changes).