In our last two posts, we reviewed Justice Rita Garman’s caseload since taking her seat in 2001 and her history with writing opinions.  This time, we’re looking at Justice Garman’s voting record.

Through the end of last week, Justice Garman has voted to affirm civil decisions 335 times.  She has cast 107 split votes (affirm in part, reverse/vacate/etc. in part) and has voted to reverse in full 333 times.

For the most part (as one might expect from those career totals), Justice Garman’s votes have been fairly evenly split between affirm and reverse year by year.  The principal outliers are 2006 (affirm 27, reverse 10), 2009 (affirm 12, reverse 21), 2012 (affirm 11, reverse 21) and 2016 (affirm 15, reverse 8).  If we count split (“AR”) votes together with outright reverse votes, the outliers are 2002 (28 reverse or AR, 20 affirm), 2003 (29 reverse or AR, 16 affirm), 2009 (29 reverse or AR, 12 affirm), 2012 (28 reverse or AR, 11 affirm), 2014 (18 reverse or AR, 9 affirm), and 2019 (22 reverse or AR, 11 affirm).

Justice Garman has voted to affirm outright in 424 criminal cases.  She has cast split votes 116 times and voted to reverse in 333 cases.  Justice Garman’s leading years for split votes were 2003, 2004 and 2002 (14, 13 and 10, respectively).  Her outlier years have been 2001 (9 reverse or AR, 31 affirm), 2004 (38 reverse or AR, 22 affirm), 2007 (19 reverse or AR, 9 affirm), 2015 (22 reverse or AR, 11 affirm), 2016 (24 reverse or AR, 11 affirm) and 2018 (18 reverse or AR, 8 affirm).

Join us back here next time for part 4 of our six-part post.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Darshan Simha (no changes).