Do Affirmances Take Longer In Automatic Death Penalty Appeals (2008-2016)?

For the past several weeks, we've been comparing the Court's lag times – time to oral argument, and then oral argument to decision – for affirmances as opposed to reversals. We've determined that affirmances tend to take longer from outset to argument than reversals do. The difference between affirmances and reversals is much greater for criminal cases than it is for civil cases. That discovery led us to wonder whether the very high affirmance rate in the death penalty docket might be driving the aggregate numbers. So we divided up the criminal docket between death penalty and non-death cases.

In Table 187 below, we show the year-by-year data for lag times in death penalty appeals from the appointment of capital counsel to oral arguments, divided between affirmances and reversals for the years 2008 through 2016. The data on reversals is fragmentary because outright reversals (including the penalty) are rare in death penalty cases. In 2008 and 2009, affirmances took