Maryland Certiorari Statistics, 2023 Term

By Steve Klepper

The judiciary’s annual statistical reports give the overall grant rate for civil and criminal certiorari petitions. But, because unrepresented (pro se) parties file the majority of petitions each year, the overall statistics are not terribly helpful for lawyers in advising their clients regarding the odds of certiorari.

Below are the statistics for the Court’s 2023 Term (petitions docketed 3/1/2023 to 2/29/2024), alongside the statistics for the 2022 Term (3/1/2022 to 2/28/2023) and 2021 Term (3/1/2021 to 2/28/2022) for comparison.

My goal is to give practitioners a fair sense of a petition’s generic odds. To that end, I make a few judgment calls:

• I count only petitions filed through counsel.
• I exclude juvenile petitions, because the dockets are not publicly available.
• I exclude petitions that were dismissed, either voluntarily or involuntarily.
• If several petitions are from the same Appellate Court opinion but are assigned separate docket numbers, I count them as one petition.
• I exclude petitions when it appears that the Court held them for consideration, pending a decision in a case raising the same issue. In some terms, especially the 2020 and 2021 Terms, including such petitions would paint a less accurate picture of a petition’s generic odds.
• I exclude an unusual petition in which the parties jointly filed for certiorari pursuant to a settlement.
• I exclude one pending civil petition.

A few caveats:

• Correlation does not imply causation.
• Each petition rises or falls on its own merits (except when the Court withholds consideration, pending resolution of a case raising a common issue).
• My data-collection efforts are not perfect.

A few observations:

• The number of civil petitions continues to plummet, and even within that smaller pool the grant rate fell from 21% to 14%. Across most metrics, the grant rate was significantly lower than last year.
• There was a slight rebound in the number of criminal petitions, but still far short of pre-COVID numbers. The grant rate decreased, but not as dramatically as for civil petitions. Across metrics, the grant rate resembled the 2021 Term more than the 2022 Term.
• If you don’t work in the Office of the Attorney General, the best predictor remains whether Appellate Court reported its opinion.