Fiscal Year 1996 saw case filings in federal courts increase across the board, according to statistics compiled by the Administrative Office. Filings in the courts of appeals grew 4 percent and total filings in U.S. district courts rose 8 percent. Bankruptcy filings exceeded the one-million mark and hit an all-time high. Despite these increases, no new Article III judgeships have been created in six years. In addition, the number of bankruptcy judgeships authorized and funded has not grown since 1993, although bankruptcy filings rose 24 percent from 1993 to 1996.
In FY96, the number of appeals filed in the 12 regional courts of appeals rose 4 percent to 51,991. This was an all-time high in filings, with eight circuits reporting increases. In FY96, 934 appeals were filed per authorized three judge panel, up 35 from the preceding year. Consistent with an FY95 growth in criminal filings related to fraud and drugs in district courts, criminal appeals rose 7 percent last year. Fraud and drug case appeals grew 24 percent and 13 percent, respectively.
Civil appeals rose 6 percent in 1996, due largely to a 13 percent increase in prisoner petitions and a 17 percent increase in employment civil rights appeals. The increase in prisoner petitions may have been in part a response to the Supreme Court's ruling in Bailey v. United States and the enactment of the Prison Litigation Reform Act. The Prison Litigation Reform Act imposed filing fees that inmates may have sought to avoid by filing before the law was implemented. Bailey established that, in order to apply enhanced penalties for using a firearm during a drug trafficking offense or crime of violence, a defendant must have used a gun while committing the offense, not merely have possessed the weapon. Inmates who received enhanced penalties may have filed for reductions in their sentences after this decision, and in FY96 there was a 39 percent jump in motions to vacate sentence.
Administrative agency appeals, bankruptcy appeals, and original proceedings in appeals courts all decreased.
There are 167 authorized judgeships in the 12 courts of appeals available to handle the record level of work; as of March 1, 1997, 26 of the judgeships were vacant.
In FY96, total filings in the U.S. district courts rose 8 percent, from 294,123 to 317,021. Caseload hasn't been this high since FY85, when filings peaked at 391,685.
Both civil and criminal case filings increased. Civil filings increased 8 percent, going from 248,335 to 269,132, largely because of a growth in private cases (i.e., those in which the U.S. government is not a party) concerning diversity of citizenship and federal question jurisdiction (i.e., the federal courts' interpretation and application of the U.S. Constitution, acts of Congress, or treaties). A 56 percent rise in personal injury/product liability filings-a large number of which were breast implant cases-helped cause total diversity of citizenship filings to increase 18 percent. Federal question litigation increased due to an 82 percent increase in personal injury filings and a 16 percent rise in civil rights filings. Most of the personal injury filings were due to a number of oil refinery explosion cases in the Middle District of Louisiana. An increase in private civil rights filings is traceable to a 25 percent jump in civil rights employment filings.
Actions involving the United States as plaintiff or defendant also rose, climbing 13 percent from 43,158 to 48,755 cases. The number of filings with the U.S. as defendant increased 14 percent as a result of a 62 percent jump in prisoner petitions involving motions to vacate sentence. Actions involving the United States as a plaintiff increased 10 percent largely due to growth in filings involving defaulted student loans.
Filings of criminal cases and numbers of criminal defendants increased 5 percent in FY96, to 47,889 and 67,700, respectively. Criminal filings grew the most in drug and immigration offenses. Drug filings rose 5 percent to 12,092 as the number of defendants charged with drug offenses rose 4 percent to 23,861. This created a defendant-to-case ratio for drug offenses of 2:1, the highest for all offenses, which highlights the impact drug cases have on court workloads. At the same time, immigration case filings rose 40 percent to 5,526, thanks in large part to Operation Gatekeeper, an interagency program to prevent and deter illegal entry across the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Immigration cases, which accounted for 12 percent of all criminal filings in FY96, constituted 4 percent of criminal case filings only four years earlier.
For more than 50 years, the federal Judiciary has applied a system of weights to filings as a means of accounting for differences in the time required for district judges to resolve various types of civil and criminal disputes. In 1996, the total number of weighted filings per authorized judgeship was 472, up 24 from the 1995 level. There are 647 authorized district court judgeships, but 67 of these positions were vacant as of March 1, 1997, 19 of them for more than 18 months. Raw filings per authorized judgeship climbed from 453 in 1995 to 490 in 1996.
On September 30, 1996, the total number of supervised persons placed on conditional release was nearly 120,000. The total includes 88,966 persons under supervision in the probation system, a 4 percent increase over the number reported as of September 30, 1995, and 30,502 persons on pretrial supervision. In comparison, the federal prison population totals 96,000.
The overall growth in persons under supervision resulted from a 16 percent rise in persons serving terms of supervised release, a period during which a person who has completed the full prison sentence mandated by federal sentencing guidelines is under supervision by federal probation officers in the community. Persons serving terms of supervised release constituted 52 percent of all persons under supervision as of September 30, 1996, making this the first fiscal year that supervised release cases accounted for a majority of all persons under supervision. Probation imposed by district judges and magistrate judges accounted for 38 percent of the population under supervision.
A total of 63,497 pretrial services defendants were activated in 1996, an increase of 6 percent from 1995. Pretrial services officers prepared a total of 60,850 bail reports in 1996, an increase of 5 percent.
The number of bankruptcy petitions filed reached an all-time high, soaring 26 percent to 1,111,964 in FY96. In comparison, for FY95, 883,457 bankruptcies were filed. A total of 326 bankruptcy judgeships are authorized and funded to handle the increasing workload. A bill to create 11 new bankruptcy judgeships was introduced in the last Congress, but did not pass.
Filings rose in all 94 districts, with 80 courts experiencing increases greater than 20 percent. The Central District of California remained the district reporting the largest number of bankruptcy filings in the country with 97,311. The Northern District of California, the Northern District of Illinois, the District of New Jersey, the Northern District of Georgia, and the Middle District of Florida all showed over 30,000 bankruptcy filings in this period. The Eastern District of California neared that mark.
In total filings, there were 761,652 Chapter 7 bankruptcy filings, an increase of 27.3 percent over the 598,250 filings in FY95. The next largest group of filings was Chapter 13 filings at 336,615, a rise of 23.9 percent over the 271,650 filings in FY95. Chapter 11 filings remained relatively stable, dropping from 12,639 in FY95 to 12,554 in FY96. Chapter 12 filings rose in this period, from 883 in FY95 to 1,096 in FY96.
Growth occurred primarily in nonbusiness filings, which rose 27 percent after an increase of 6 percent in 1995. Business filings totaled 53,520. Non-business filings totaled 1,058,444.