A State Supreme Court in Transition
| Publication year | 2001 |
I. Introduction
While many scholars have studied the makeup and personalities of the United States Supreme Court at points throughout history, there have been no such comprehensive studies of the Washington Supreme Court. The only major publication about the court's activity is the annual compilation of caseload statistics from the Office of Administrator for the Courts.(fn1) Apart from an occasional article in
This article presents a statistical snapshot of voting patterns within the court at the turn of the century and then explores how the changing makeup of the court may affect substantive areas of the law. The Washington Supreme Court is in a state of transition; following the November 2000 elections, only Justice Smith has served more than ten years on the high court. Four of the nine justices are serving their first terms. By looking at the opinions and voting records of both the remaining and departing members of the court, we can make some generalizations about the disposition of individual justices and even blocs of justices. Analysis of the same data in a particular area of law may also enable one to predict about future developments as well.
The Article begins with a brief discussion on its methodology. Part III of the Article presents the statistics themselves with a brief commentary. Part IV provides an analysis of the court, focusing on voting patterns and particular types of issues that might be affected by a changing court. This is done by examining seven criminal law cases from the court during the term studied and one case from the succeeding court.
II. METHODOLOGY
Because justices of the Washington Supreme Court are elected, how a newly elected member participates is a natural point to begin compiling statistics. Justice Ireland joined the court in November 1998. The first opinion she participated in was
During the study period, the court issued 234 written opinions. Each opinion was analyzed to determine several facts. The first was which lower appellate court's opinion was under review in order to determine possible variances among the justices, based on geographical divisions. The second datum recorded was who wrote the majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions. The third was how each justice voted. From that information, we created a matrix of alignment. A small amount of judgment was used in evaluating certain concurring opinions to determine whether they expressed full agreement or partial agreement with the majority view. If, for example, the concurring opinion stated agreement with the majority and the justice wrote it solely to reply to a dissenting justice, that concurring opinion and the justices signing onto it were treated as signing onto the majority opinion. By contrast, if the concurring opinion agreed with the result of the majority opinion but disagreed with its rationale, the opinion and those signing onto it were treated as having truly concurred. For purposes of alignment, opinions that concurred in part and dissented in part were generally treated as disagreeing with both the majority and dissenting opinions.
In analyzing treatment of lower court decisions by geographical area, only court of appeals decisions were included. That is, this study looked at whether the supreme court was more likely to affirm or reverse any particular division of the court of appeals. Cases emanating from a geographical area on direct review from the trial court were treated separately.
One type of case merits special mention: the Personal Restraint Petition (PRP). According to the Washington Supreme Court's published caseloads for 2000, PRPs make up almost half of the court's new cases.(fn4) Most are not decided with published opinions, but some are. During this study, almost sixty published opinions responded to PRPs. For purposes of this study, they were treated as other decisions (classified by appellate division or direct review and evaluated with respect to treatment).
III. THE STATISTICS
1. Does the Court Have a Geographical Bias in Its Disposition of Appeals?
Since the November 2000 elections left no member of the court from Eastern Washington, one question is whether the court's disposition of appeals shows any geographical biases. During the time of this article's study, the court's makeup was skewed to the west as well; only Justice Guy was from Division III. Five justices were from Division I (all from King County), and one additional justice, Madsen, had worked and lived in King County until she joined the supreme court and presumably moved to Division II to be closer to her place of employment. Two members of the court, Johnson and Alexander, are from Division II.
Nevertheless, the study results show no significant bias toward any division, least of all toward Division I.(fn5) One hundred sixty-six opinions came to the supreme court through the court of appeals. An additional fifty-three opinions were for cases on direct review. Of the cases from the court of appeals, seventy-two came from Division I (43%), sixty-two came from Division II (37%), and thirty-two came from Division III (19%).(fn6) The decisions were classified into the following three categories: (1) decisions affirming the lower court; (2) decisions reversing the lower court; and (3) decisions affirming the lower court in part and reversing it in part.
The numbers for all divisions show that the supreme court affirmed the court of appeals seventy-seven times (46%), reversed it seventy times (42%), and reversed it in part and affirmed it in part nineteen times (11%). Thus, by our methodology, the supreme court reversed the court of appeals to at least some degree over 53% of the time. As low as these numbers seem, the court of appeals fared much better on review than the lower courts subject to direct review. There were fifty-three cases in the study that went through direct review. Of those, nineteen (36%) were affirmed, nineteen were reversed (36%), and fifteen (28%) were affirmed in part and reversed in part. That adds up to 64% of the cases on direct review being reversed to some extent.
Within the geographical divisions, Divisions II and III actually had the highest approval rating. Of these two, Division II had the highest percentage of affirmed decisions. Of the sixty-two cases reviewed, thirty (48%) were affirmed; twenty-eight (45%) were reversed; and four (6%) were affirmed in part and reversed in part. Although Division II had a higher percentage of affirmed decisions, the latter two numbers result in a higher percentage of reversed decisions in Division II than Division III. Of the thirty-two Division III cases reviewed, fifteen (47%) were affirmed, the same number and percentage were reversed (47%), and two (6%) were affirmed in part and reversed in part. That results in 53% of the division's reviewed cases being reversed in some part.
Although Division I actually had the lowest percentage of cases reversed in their entirety, it also had the lowest percentage of affirmed decisions. Of the seventy-two decisions reviewed by the supreme court, thirty-two (44%) were affirmed, twenty-seven (37%) were reversed, and thirteen cases (18%) were affirmed in part and reversed in part. The forty cases reversed in some respect total the highest percentage of reversal (62%) of the appellate divisions.
The variation between the percentages of affirmation by the supreme court are minimal. However, it does appear that, at least for the term of the study, there was no geographical bias in favor of the region from which most of the court's members came. It also appears that the supreme court is more likely to affirm a decision by its appellate colleagues than one on direct review.
2. How Frequently Does the Supreme Court Reverse Lower Court Rulings?
Initially, the high reversal rate indicated by these numbers and percentages is somewhat striking. One hopes that the law itself had a certain amount of clarity to it. One further hopes that appellate judges (at whatever level) would interpret the law similarly, bound by the same precedents. That the supreme court affirms in full less than 50% of court of appeals decisions is surprising at first glance. However, it is probable that those lower court cases likely to be affirmed are denied a discretionary review by the supreme court. If the law is settled and was applied correctly by the appellate court, there is no need to hear the...
To continue reading
Request your trial