Yesterday, we began addressing the average votes to affirm, District by District and Division by Division, of the Appellate Court in criminal cases before the Illinois Supreme Court between 2000 and 2004.  Today, we turn to a related question: which Districts of the Appellate Court had the highest percentage of their criminal cases result in unanimous reversals – votes to affirm of zero?

The data is reported in Table 325 below.  All three of the criminal cases which arose from Division Two of the First District were unanimously reversed.  Half of the cases from Divisions Three and Four of the First District were unanimously reversed as well.  Districts Three and Four were right behind, with 47.22% and 45%, respectively, of those courts’ criminal cases being unanimously reversed.  District Five had 35.29% of its criminal decisions end in unanimous reversals during these five years.  Divisions Five and Six of the First District and the Second District were right behind District Five, with one third of their decisions ending in unanimous reversals.  Division One of the First District was next, with only 28.57% of its criminal decisions ending in unanimous reversals between 2000 and 2004.  Direct appeals performed best – not surprisingly, given that direct appeals were the highest average votes to affirm in non-unanimous cases.  Only 17.7% of direct appeals in criminal cases ended in unanimous reversals.

Join us back here next Tuesday as we address average votes to affirm in the civil docket between 2005 and 2009.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Teemu008 (no changes).