State Criminal Appeals Revealed

IntroductionEvery state provides appellate review of criminal judgments, yet little research examines which factors correlate with favorable outcomes for defendants who seek appellate relief.1 To address this scholarly gap, this Article exploits the Survey of criminal Appeals in State Courts (2010) dataset, recently released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Center for State Courts (hereinafter, "NCSC Study"). The NCSC Study is the first and only publicly available national dataset on state criminal appeals and includes unprecedented information from every state court in the nation with jurisdiction to review criminal judgments.2Building upon prior research that we describe in Part I, our research design, described in Part II, focuses on two subpools of state criminal appeals: a defendant's first appeal of right, and defense appeals to courts of last resort with the discretion to grant or deny review. Error correction, of course, is paramount in the first context, for typically an appeal of right is a defendant's only chance at review. By contrast, courts of last resort with discretionary jurisdiction emphasize law development, selecting cases to clarify or alter legal rules, resolve conflicts, and remedy the most egregious mistakes.3 Given the critical differences between these two streams of appeals, we measure a defendant's "success" in distinct ways. For first appeals of right, we model a defendant's success in receiving a review on the merits and obtaining a favorable outcome. In the court of last resort setting, we model a defendant's success in terms of obtaining leave to appeal and, for those appeals granted review, obtaining a favorable outcome.Our findings are presented in Part III and discussed in the Conclusion. Comparisons with existing studies imply that defense appellate success rates may have declined in recent decades. In appeals of right, defendants who challenge a sentence enjoy a greater likelihood of success, as do those who have legal representation, file a reply brief or secure oral argument, and appellants from Florida. In high courts of last resort, appeals from sex offenses, raising certain trial issues, and appellants represented by publicly funded attorneys appear to fare better than others. Also notable is the absence of a relation between defense success and factors including most crime types and claims raised, the court's workload, and, for all but one model, whether the appellate judges were selected by election.I. Prior Research on Criminal Appeals OutcomesWe are aware of no other dataset that comes close to the Nese Study in terms of depth and breadth. Most states have collected and published only disposition times and aggregate caseload information for criminal appeals (i.e., number of cases filed, pending, and disposed). The Nese Study itself remains underexamined despite its public release. Two Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletins report descriptive and preliminary information, often aggregating appeals from the two contexts that we study separately.4 While existing empirical research is limited, it nonetheless provides helpful methodological strategies and findings concerning the determinants of successful appeals.National Center for State Courts' researchers Joyce Chapper and Roger Hanson authored the leading study on intermediate appellate court outcomes in 1989. They collected data from nearly 1,750 first appeals of right filed by defendants and resolved between 1983 and 1985 in five states' courts, and reported defense success rates for specified claims, crime types, and types of representation.5 Chapper and Hanson found an overall defense win rate of approximately 20%, coding any outcome other than a complete affirmance or a dismissal as a decision favorable to the defense.6Two more recent case studies also address intermediate court decisions in single states. Buller examined whether the type of representation for the defendant correlates with outcomes in 987 intermediate court criminal appeals in Iowa during 2012 and 2013 (including misdemeanor and postconviction appeals), finding 16. …