Just happened in the case of (former VA governor) Bob McDonnell. His conviction had been upheld on appeal by a 3-0 majority, but the USSC just overturned that verdict 8-0.
How common is something like this?
It happens more than you might think. There are lots of articles about how the Ninth Circuit has long been a punching bag for the Supreme Court, and now the Sixth Circuit is too. It’s not always apparent from these articles how many of the Circuit-level decisions being overturned unanimously were themselves unanimous, but at least some of them are, and the interested reader could certainly drill down a bit farther and research the question.
On a related note: a case in which 3 separate appeals courts all ruled one way on an issue, only to have the USSC rule the other way, 8-0.
Just a note. Three people are a fraction of the whole Sixth Circuit Court. Cases are often decided by panels such as these. That makes it more likely that unanimous decisions are reached. The full Sixth is fourteen people. The Ninth is 22 people.* Any time you pull a small group out of a larger one you run the chance of getting decisions that the full group might not reach. Conversely, the Supreme Court has enormous incentive to issue unanimous decisions and hates the fractured, political 5-4 cases because the result is better public policy.
When a case goes from a panel to the full circuit court and when it goes directly to the Supreme Court I’ll leave to one of our lawyers.
- Based on a count of seated justices plus vacancies on WIkipedia. I may be off by 1 or 2.
There is generally no right to an en banc appeal (re-hearing before all the judges of an appellate court) but the court may choose to grant one if there is conflict between a panel’s ruling and other rulings of the same court in similar cases. Sometimes the Supreme Court will remand a case to an en banc hearing before the appellate court.
I have not read the appellate court decisions. However, this sort of thing happens a fair amount over time. It’s usually because the Supreme Court has said “x” in some case in the past, and appellate courts take “x” and think that must mean “x+1” when presented with something similar, and the Supreme Court comes along and says, “No, ‘x+1’ is not right because this is a ‘not-x’ case, so ‘y’ applies.” In the specific case here, the Court decided that the 1980 amendment to the ERISA “church plan” exemption did indeed include organizations not established by churches. It’s a statutory interpretation issue, and while it’s a bit surprising that no one at any of the lower levels bought into the interpretation that had been used by relevant agencies for 30+ years, and got adopted unanimously by the Court, it’s not a total shock.