Judges and Judiciary
Aug. 13, 2002
9th Circuit Is Really, Really Busy
SAN FRANCISCO - The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals remains the busiest appellate court in the country, with appeals filed in fiscal year 2001 topping 10,000 for the first time.
The court's annual report, issued last week, noted that the number of appeals filed rose 5.4 percent over the prior year. The median time between filing of an appeal and final disposition is still the longest in the nation - 16.1 months.
The quickest turnaround for appeals is in the Richmond, Va.-based 4th Circuit, with 7.3 months.
Among the district courts in the circuit, San Diego judges have, by far, the heaviest caseload. The eight judges there average 1,068 "weighted filings" per judge with complex cases counting for more than simple cases. That is more than double the 521 cases per judge in San Francisco's 14-judge Northern District. In Los Angeles, the caseload is 484 per judge among 27 judges, according to the report.
The single biggest cause for the high caseload in San Diego is the large number of immigration cases on the Mexican border.
This also has placed an additional burden on federal public defenders in San Diego. The district reported 5,971 new cases filed in fiscal year 2001, the second-largest total of new cases of any public defender office in the nation, according to the report.
Drug smuggling over the border made up 19 percent of the new cases for the year and 23 percent of the cases opened for the year were immigration cases.
Drug and immigration offenses also led criminal filings throughout California. Charges for fraud were a distant third.
For sheer numbers, the Los Angeles-based Central District generated the largest number of appeals with 2,342 cases, or 23.3 percent of the circuit's workload.
Although the number of appeals swelled to 10,054 for the year, the number of cases terminated grew even faster, reaching 10,227 cases, up 8.4 percent over the prior year.
For the 16 months it takes to decide a typical case in the circuit, the largest delay is from the end of briefing to oral argument or submission. That median time, used by judges to prepare their decision, was 6.4 months, The second-largest chunk was the time between filing the appeal and the completion of briefing by the attorneys, with a median time of 5.8 months.
The median time from oral argument to a decision is one month and two weeks, and the median time for cases submitted without oral argument to reach decision is three weeks, the report said.
Pamela Mac Lean
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