According to the FY2005 Statistical Report for the Texas Judiciary three courts of appeals had no civil cases and four courts no criminal cases under submission for more than 12 months, but almost 43% of the civil cases and 11.45% of the criminal cases pending in the 13th Court took more than 12 months to be decided after submission and over 10% of the civil cases on its docket were more than 2 years old. The 6 judges wrote an average of 143 opinions each, and the court had clearance rates in excess of 100% so that does not appear to be the problem. I am curious about what is the cause.

Some of the backlog problem is due to the fact that, until about a year ago, the Thirteenth automatically granted oral argument. If one party asked for argument, it was granted. The wait for an argument date was sometimes quite long. Last fall, the court went to the system that all the larger appellate courts employ: deciding which cases it wants to hear. Some of the delay in criminal cases is due to appellate defense counsel typically requesting multiple extensions and, admittedly, this office rarely gets a brief filed without at least one 30-day extension. Also, some years back, some of the big city courts got extra funding for more staff to help reduce their backlogs. I do not know if these positions were made permanent, but the other courts never got such help.

My understanding of the appellate court statistics is rather sketchy, but it is clear that the clearance rate depends on the number of dispositions. In my limited understanding of the term, a disposition does not necessarily mean that an opinion has been handed down, only that the case has been removed from the docket. I believe an abatement counts as a disposition. Therefore it is possible to have a 100%-plus clearance rate and still have old cases on the docket. Some courts of appeals, including the Thirteenth, held that the new appellate rule requiring certification of right to appeal should be applied to all criminal cases then pending before the court, and abated all those cases back to the trial court for the proper certification. Each abatement counted as a disposition, which would definitely improve the overall clearance rate, and any other performance rating based on dispositions.

If anyone has better information, I would appreciate seeing it. As this is all public information, it must be available from OCA.

You are right about an abatement counting as a disposition (or at least you were the last time I was in a position to keep up with these things). I worked for one of the smaller courts of appeals, and it was common knowledge that some of the bigger ones would abate cases for various reasons to keep their numbers "up."

Those numbers used to be quite a big deal as far as getting ready to go to the Legislature for budgeting. I am sure that are even bigger still, because I was at the court during the more cash-available late 90's.

Maybe Corpus is just too honest.