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Yesterday, we began our look at the Illinois Supreme Court’s criminal docket for the years 2005 to 2009 by calculating average votes to affirm, District by District of the Appellate Court.  Today, we ask a related question: what fraction of each District and Division’s criminal decisions were reversed unanimously by the Supreme Court – a votes to affirm of zero?

We noted yesterday that a number of Districts and Divisions had quite low votes to affirm averages for unanimous decisions.  In Table 329 below, we see part of the explanation for that result – a significant fraction of Appellate Court decisions was reversed unanimously.

Two thirds of the criminal decisions from Division Three of the First District and the Fifth District were reversed unanimously.  Division Four of the First District, which was third from the bottom in average votes to affirm for unanimous cases, had 61.54% of its criminal cases reversed unanimously.  Among unattributed decisions of the First District, 51.52% were reversed unanimously.  Among direct appeals from the Circuit Court, 44.44% were unanimously reversed.  The Third District and Division Five of the First District were right behind, with 43.24% and 42.86% unanimous reversals, respectively.  For Division One of the First District, 37.5% of criminal cases were unanimously reversed.  One third of criminal decisions from Division Two were unanimously reversed.  The Second and Fourth Districts fared reasonably well, with only 31.58% and 30.56%, respectively, of their criminal decisions unanimously reversed.  Finally, only one quarter of criminal decisions from Division Six of the First District had a votes to affirm of zero.

Table 329

Join us back here next Tuesday as we begin our look at average votes to affirm for civil cases between 2010 and 2015.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Ron Frazier (no changes).