More on 3d DCA Delay

The Recorder has Taking Complaint Public, Lawyer Confronts Appellate Court's Delays
Jon Eisenberg is accusing three justices on California's Third District Court of Appeal in Sacramento of allowing some matters languish over the last three years. The court handles a heavy workload. At one point in 2018, it had the highest number of pending, fully briefed appeals per authorized justice among all state appellate districts.

• In a 12-page letter addressed to the Commission on Judicial Performance, Eisenberg wrote that Presiding Justice Vance Raye and Associate Justices Cole Blease and William Murray Jr. often miss a 90-day target for submitting fully briefed cases for decisions. The three justices have issued a combined 150 opinions that took anywhere from two years to more than seven years to complete, according to Eisenberg. The court’s seven other justices rarely exceed more than a year from the time a case is fully briefed to when it is submitted for a decision, he wrote.
  
• Raye and Murray declined to comment on Eisenberg’s letter. Blease did not reply to a message seeking comment.
• “I think he deserves hero status for being willing to do this,” said Raoul Kennedy, a retired trial and appellate lawyer at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. “He’s like a modern-day Martin Luther tacking his theses to the church door.”
• the Third District is one of the slowest in processing cases. The court took 1,522 days to process 90% of civil appeals during the 2018-19 fiscal year, by far the longest period for reaching that threshold among all six courts, according to Judicial Council statistics. The median time for the Third District to process civil appeals was 829 days, just shy of the system’s slowest median time, 830 days, set by the Sixth District in San Jose.
• In a statement issued Feb. 8, the California Academy of Appellate Lawyers called Eisenberg’s findings “troubling.”

• The Commission on Judicial Performance has disciplined a handful of judges in recent years for “decisional delay,” or taking too long to process cases. The agency’s 2018 annual report noted that an unnamed appellate justice received a private advisory letter for failing to timely rule on two habeas corpus petitions.