Maryland Certiorari Statistics, 2024 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 2024 Term (petitions docketed 3/1/2024 to 2/29/2025), alongside the statistics for the 2023 Term (3/1/2023 to 2/29/2024) and 2022 Term (3/1/2022 to 2/28/2023) 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 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:

• For civil petitions, the grant rate of 29% was the highest since 30% in 2019.  
• Meanwhile, the grant rate for criminal petitions plummeted down to 20%. That’s the lowest since I started tracking the petition docket in 2017. The second-lowest was last year (25%).
• Four points jump out in measuring the decline in the grant rate for criminal petitions: (1) the State usually bats close to 1.000 on criminal petitions but was a shocking 0 for 2 this year; (2) only 2 of 8 petitions were granted from reported Appellate Court opinions; (3) there were five petitions from Appellate Court opinions that drew dissents, and only one was granted; and (4) the Office of the Public Defender’s grant rate dropped to 16%, which is the lowest I’ve recorded and the first time the OPD’s grant rate dropped below private counsel’s grant rate.