Number of Jury Trials May Be On the Rise
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I had the opportunity to hear Chief U.S. District Judge Janet Hall give her annual “state of the district” report to the Connecticut Bar Association’s Federal Practice Section the other day. One of the pleasures of being bar president is getting to be a fly on the wall as learned and collegial groups such as the federal section gather to celebrate the good things they have accomplished together and mourn those who have left us.
One interesting piece of information was that the number of completed jury trials in Connecticut federal courts have significantly increased in the last year, a trend that has been continuing on the federal side, leading Hall to muse that if the late Mark Kravitz had been around, he would have been surprised, if not chagrined, at this development. A decade ago, Judge Kravitz famously wrote on the vanishing jury trial and despaired over what the loss of trial and appellate decisions meant for the development of the common law.
Though some I have shared this with noted that the numbers might actually reflect a more aggressive U.S. Attorney’s Office than a willingness of civil litigants to let juries decide their fates (I don’t have the breakout of civil vs. criminal trials), it is a trend worth noting. I asked the Connecticut Judicial Branch officials if they had similar numbers and they sent me some very helpful statistics.
In the past decade, court trials ending with a judgment have gone from 432 to a high of 527 and most recently have settled in the high 400’s—479 being the number in the last year with complete statistics. Jury trials, on the other hand, have gone from 462 to a low of 282 and were at 318 in the most recent survey. These numbers also include nonsuits and stipulations, but I will assume that the percentage of the whole represented by those dispositions remain static.
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