Maryland Certiorari Statistics, 2025 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 about the odds of certiorari.

Below are the statistics for the Court’s 2025 Term (petitions docketed 3/1/2025 to 2/28/2026), alongside the statistics for the 2024 Term (petitions docketed 3/1/2024 to 2/29/2025) and the 2023 Term (3/1/2023 to 2/29/2024) 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.
• I make judgment calls whether to consider related petitions as one for tracking purposes.
• 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.

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.