Does being overturned on appeal have consequences for the careers of trial judges? Would a 95% rate of being overturned on appeal have any effect on a judge's career?
canada The mere fact of being frequently overturned on appeal would only have reputational consequences and secondary effects on career advancement (not suggesting these are minor effects). But being overturned at a rate of 95% suggests that the judge might not be conducting themselves with integrity or not being diligent in the performance of their judicial duties. These are two core ethical principles set out by the Canadian Judicial Council (CJC). (However, the CJC is clear that these principles &quot;do not set out standards for defining judicial misconduct.&quot;) Depending on what is leading the judge to such a high rate of appellate intervention, the underlying cause may warrant removal. The possible reasons that the CJC can recommend a judge to be removed are listed at s. 65(2)(a) to (d) of the Judges Act: Where, in the opinion of the Council, the judge in respect of whom an inquiry or investigation has been made has become incapacitated or disabled from the due execution of the office of judge by reason of (a) age or infirmity, (b) having been guilty of misconduct, (c) having failed in the due execution of that office, or (d) having been placed, by his or her conduct or otherwise, in a position incompatible with the due execution of that office, the Council, in its report to the Minister under subsection (1), may recommend that the judge be removed from office. For some examples where the CJC recommended removal of a judge, see: the Report to the Minister of Justice re: Paul Cosgrove (2009) (in which the CJC declined to consider whether serious incompetence could be a ground for removal; instead basing the recommendation for removal on serious misconduct that was damaging to the administration of jusice and the public's confidence in the judiciary); the Report to the Minister of Justice re: Robin Camp (2017).
Constitutional matters can be, and often are, decided by a single judge in a garden-variety trial court. It's just that the judge's decisions may be reviewed and possibly overturned by a higher court, one of which is the supreme court. Furthermore, district courts are bound by precedent. If a case turns on a new statute, however, the trial judge can indeed find that new statute unconstitutional without a higher court first having done so. If a panel of judges is evenly divided on whether to overturn a lower court's ruling, the lower court's ruling stands, but no precedent is set. The supreme court often has an even number of justices hearing a case, whether because of a vacancy or because a justice has recused him or herself.
Without being omniscient, it is impossible to pin down an exact percentage, and there are a lot of context specific reasons why some kinds of &quot;easy&quot; cases are more likely to go to trial than others. But, there have been quite a few serious efforts to answer this question with data (putting aside the normative issue of whether you should go to trial when you are likely to lose). One of the best statistical estimates comes from an analysis of criminal jury trials in Sarasota, Florida and the race of the jurors on the jury pool. Based upon that study, it is possible to infer statistically that an average juror of either race would reach the same aquittal or conviction decision in about 55% of cases involving black defendants and about 68% of cases involving white defendants. But, there are many other cases that are close enough on the merits given the likely available that the outcome depends upon the race of the jury, which basically means that the evidence can be reasonably viewed in different lights to reach different conclusions based upon your predispositions before seeing it. For the sample as a whole, about 68% of cases where convictions results and a minimum of 14% of cases that produce acquittals, are sufficiently clear than the racial composition of the jury doesn't matter. Given that something like 90% of cases produce plea bargains generally, and that plea bargains are usually made before a jury pool is drawn, the random impact of the racial makeup of the jury pool that is selected for a case in Sarasota, Florida only directly matters in about 2% of all criminal prosecutions. My criminal procedure professor from law school made one of the most comprehensive surveys of data pertinent to estimating wrongful conviction rate ever prepared. He concludes that wrongful conviction rates for murders and rapes are on the order of 2.3%-5%, and that wrongful conviction rates for other serious felonies are probably somewhat lower (since weak cases are less often pursued) but that it is harder to determine precisely what error rate is involved since the legal process and civic activism rarely takes the time and resources necessary to consider wrongful juvenile convictions or wrongful convictions for less serious crimes. Other sources have suggested that wrongful conviction cases, and studies comparing jury outcomes with conclusions of the presiding judges in the cases regarding where the jury does and does not agree with the judge regarding the correct outcome generally speaking point to a similar level of uncertainty in decision making accuracy. suggest that as many as 10-20% of jury determinations are erroneous, although this is to some extent a product of samples biased for cases with a high risk of wrongful convictions. For example, analysis of a special set of state court cases in 2000-01 from four jurisdictions in a study by the National Center for State Courts (Hannaford-Agor et al 2003) suggested that approximately 17% of jury verdicts were inaccurate, 7% of the all jury verdicts were wrongful convictions and 10% of all jury verdicts were wrongful acquittals, with corresponding rates of 10% wrongful convictions and 1% wrongful acquittals for the judges' verdicts (Spencer 2007). Similarly, an abstract of one study stated that: &quot;I examine . . . how the criminal system in the United States handled the cases of people who were subsequently found innocent through post-conviction DNA testing. . . . The leading types of evidence supporting their wrongful convictions were erroneous eyewitness identifications, faulty forensic evidence, informant testimony, and false confessions. . . . . few innocent appellants brought claims regarding those facts, nor did many bring claims alleging their innocence. For those who did, hardly any claims were granted by appellate courts. . . . courts often denied relief by finding error to be harmless on account of the appellant's guilt. Criminal appeals brought before they proved their innocence using DNA yielded apparently high numbers of reversals—a fourteen percent reversal rate. However, . . . the reversal rate is indistinguishable from the background rate in appeals of comparable rape and murder convictions[.]&quot; Another way to judge the ratio of easy to hard cases is to look at conviction or verdict rates in cases that go to trial. While the vast majority of criminal charges brought result in conviction of something and the vast majority of civil cases brought result in a judgment for the Plaintiff, in an hypothetical ideal world where the lawyers and parties on both sides of cases are rational actors with the best available information and there is no bias in the availability of information, you would expect pre-trial settlements to resolve, on average, all of the cases with an objective lean one way or the other, leaving only the cases that are, on average, coin flips left to go to trial, with 50-50 outcomes, regardless of the mix of cases originally filed. And, that model isn't horrible. Less than 2% of civil cases and less than 10% of criminal cases go to trial. Civil case outcomes vary by type of case, but the overall result in those the go to trial is close to 50-50. But, in criminal cases, convictions greatly outnumber acquittals, because &quot;easy cases&quot; where a conviction is likely often still go to trial, because neither side is paying for their lawyers from their own funds in most cases, because there is little incentive to offer favorable settlements in close cases, and because, as discussed below, there is a significant irreducible risk of an inaccurate outcome. In federal criminal cases that actually go to trial, the Pew Research Center’s data shows that defendants who pursue a trial experience different outcomes based on whether they choose a bench or jury trial. The acquittal rate in bench trials is 38% (a very small and unrepresentative sample), whereas it’s 14% for juried trials (the vast majority of cases). This would suggest that about 72% of federal jury trials are &quot;easy&quot; cases, while about 28% are &quot;hard&quot; cases, in line with the Sarasota study in order of magnitude. Note that this is different from &quot;conviction rates&quot; which compare the percentage of cases charged that produce guilty verdicts or plea bargains, rather than conviction rates in the subset of cases that go to trial. The percentage of people charged with some federal crime who end up being convicted of something is very, very high, compared to state court, but that is almost entirely due to the ability of federal prosecutors to cherry pick strong cases with high mandatory minimum penalties and to secure plea bargains as a result, rather than from different rates of criminal jury trial outcomes. Still, in &quot;2018, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that among defendants charged with a felony, 68% were convicted (59% of a felony and the remainder of a misdemeanor)&quot; and the conviction rate at trial is lower than the conviction rate of all people charged criminally with felonies, since plea bargains are more common than unilateral government dismissals of all charges. But, in almost every court system, more than 50% of criminal trials result in convictions. So, the percentage of &quot;easy&quot; criminal cases going to trial in state courts is still significantly lower than in federal courts. Maybe the percentage of state criminal cases going to trial that are &quot;easy cases&quot; in the range of 5%-20% in this kind of analysis (which is quite a bit lower than the more rigorously designed Sarasota study). The challenging thing, of course, is knowing in advance which cases judges or juries will get wrong. I typically conceptualize the issue as a certain irreducible uncertainty of outcome any time you actually roll the dice on going to trial on the order of 10%-20% whether you are in front of a judge or a jury, and an additional uncertainty in cases where there is some specific reason to think that the outcome is a close call, or that special risk factors for inaccurate verdicts (like heavy reliance on cross-racial eye witness identification of suspects) is present. From the perspective a client, even in a seemingly secure case, this impacts how plea bargains and settlement offers are evaluated. If your client is actually in the wrong and facing very severe punishment and there are no offers to settle that don't also involve very severe punishment, going to trial and hoping to benefit from the irreducible inaccuracy of trial determinations can be rational even in a quite weak case. Likewise, in either a civil or a criminal case, if getting some win is much more important for the person bringing the case, than getting a &quot;home run&quot; maximal win, making a lenient deal even in a fairly solid case can make sense to avoid the risk of rolling the dice and the irreducible risk of error any time there is a trial. Also, of course, lots and lots of parties to both criminal and civil cases are not rational actors and make bad decisions. These characteristics of parties to legal cases frequently play a large part in the fact that these parties ended up having to deal with the legal system in the first place. One of the difficult systemic and institutional issues, however, is that the behavior of people who are irrational because they are dumb or crazy, and the behavior of people in the system who are innocent and have excessive but not necessarily unreasonable trust in the accuracy of the judicial process, can look very similar. People who are factually innocent systemically insist on going to trial even in the face of lenient plea bargains at rates much higher than people who are factually guilty, even in cases that seem to have identical strength before a neutral third-party, and are, as a result, over represented in the ranks of people who actually go to trial.
Once a case has been commenced, you can definitely lose, or you can probably lose. If you decline to proceed, you definitely lose. If you proceed, the jury (or judge as the case might be), might find some witnesses more believable than others and might find that the forensic evidence is not as convincing as it seems. Empirical evidence suggests that criminal trials reach the correct conclusion in about 90% of cases that aren't resolved on an uncontested basis. Generally speaking, the Crown is only going to press a case where the prosecutor subjectively believes that they are correct that the defendant is, at least, guilty of something. So, a Crown prosecutor can also justify "rolling the dice" in a case with a low probability of winning, because at a minimum, a factually guilty defendant (whether it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt or not in a particular trial with a particular finder of fact) has to suffer through a trial which is a form of punishment (particularly if the defendant can't secure pre-trial release). Also, while the Crown prosecutor ultimately represents the state and not the victim, the victim of a crime is a quasi-client and sometimes a victim who often has personal knowledge of a defendant's factual guilt, really wants to have their "day in court" and a chance to present their case to the public for all to hear. Law enforcement officers working on the case may want it to go to trial for similar reasons. Strategically, bringing even weak cases to trial also makes a Crown prosecutors threat to go forward with a trial even in a seemingly weak case more credible and that can increase the prosecutor's negotiating power. Also, a trial always reveals information, and sometimes the information revealed in a trial that is lost can provide value in future law enforcement efforts. Finally, prosecutors are humans and people, in general, don't like to admit their own mistakes. So, they may go forward even when their case is weak because they don't want to admit that they were mistaken and would prefer to have somebody else say they were wrong than to admit error. The personality type that doesn't admit mistakes is pretty common in this area.
This was asked and answered by KPD on the Politics stackexchange. This issue came up in a decision from an appeals court, with a judge dying before the opinion was released, leading to the following SCOTUS opinion. The short of the answer: that Judge's vote is voided. If the result of negating the deceased Justice's vote is a 4-4 tie, then the usual procedure for a 4-4 tie is invoked, which is addressed in the Q&amp;A you link. Of course this assumes that SCOTUS will apply this to themselves, but the issue appears to be non-controversial, as it was a fairly recent decision with no dissents noted. So this assumption seems safe.
Is it possible for a witness to backtrack and claim that their previous statements were wrong because they misremembered? ... Is the witness now allowed to say something along the lines: &quot;Huh. That's odd. I clearly remember it differently. But it's such a small detail and it was so long ago...&quot;? Yes. Or is it now considered a deliberate lie? A judge's assessment of a witness's credibility and reliability is much more nuanced. See &quot;How is a judge to evaluate a witness's credibility?&quot;
This happened despite the fact that the marriage and Bible verses requirement were almost surely illegal and similar things have happened on and off, mostly in rural courts with non-attorney judges, for pretty much as long as the U.S. has been a country (and earlier). The trick is that the orders take effect unless someone appeals them, and since deals like this are usually a result of a plea bargain which waives rights to an appeal, and even if the result is simply imposed by the judge, one has to consider if taking the case up on appeal, having the sentence reversed, and then having it remanded to the same judge for resentencing would be worse from the perspective of the defendant, given the broad authority of a sentencing judge in a minor case like this one, than simply accepting the illegal sentence. Also, cases that aren't appealed never create precedents and aren't generally available among resources used by legal researchers, so they systemically evade documentation in easily available sources.
The evidence will almost certainly be inadmissible And, of course, you will be disbarred and never work as a lawyer again, you might also go to jail for attempting to pervert the course of justice. Whether the person is convicted or not will depend on the strength of the other evidence the state has. In the notorious case of Lawyer X, Nicola Gobbo was acting as a barrister for a number of Melbourne underworld figures while simultaneously acting as a police informer. A number of those convicted have successfully appealed their convictions on the basis that they didn’t get a fair trial. In their judgement on AB (a pseudonym) v. CD (a pseudonym); EF (a pseudonym) v. CD (a pseudonym) [2018] HCA 58 the High Court said: But where, as here, the agency of police informer has been so abused as to corrupt the criminal justice system, there arises a greater public interest in disclosure to which the public interest in informer anonymity must yield. EF's actions in purporting to act as counsel for the Convicted Persons while covertly informing against them were fundamental and appalling breaches of EF's obligations as counsel to her clients and of EF's duties to the court. Likewise, Victoria Police were guilty of reprehensible conduct in knowingly encouraging EF to do as she did and were involved in sanctioning atrocious breaches of the sworn duty of every police officer to discharge all duties imposed on them faithfully and according to law without favour or affection, malice or ill-will. As a result, the prosecution of each Convicted Person was corrupted in a manner which debased fundamental premises of the criminal justice system.