I posted earlier about divided opinions in the Mississippi Supreme Court so far this year. There’s not a lot to be learned from last week’s decision list about that. Here’s what I see.
In a case that’s had newspaper coverage, the Imperial Palace Casino won a unanimous ruling against the casino patron who had a slot machine flash that she’d won $1,000,000, when the machine’s maximum payout was $8,000. She gets the $8K.
Beyond that, there’s no real news. There are three instances of those odd not-quite concurrences. One is in a contract case written by Waller that I found interesting (but I’m easily entertained), about the survival of a non-compete contract with employees after the transfer-of-assets in a business. Dickinson “concurs in part and in result without separate written opinion.” In an unexceptional appeal of a murder case written by Randolph (it’s so unexceptional that I wondered why it was in the Supreme Court and not the Court of Appeals. Are capital murder cases assigned to the Supreme Court even when they result in a life sentence?), involving two very weak issues (admission of autopsy photos and a very slight ineffectiveness claim), Graves concurs in the result only. The third is a Graves opinion in an appeal from the refusal to send a malpractice case into arbitration. The circuit judge found that the hospice/defendant failed to prove that the patient had signed the consent to arbitration. Justices Randolph and Dickinson concurred in the result only.
What are we supposed to take away from these not-quite-joinings-in? Is the justice saying he or she disagrees with something in the majority opinion, and if so, shouldn’t they explain?
One last aside– The circuit court deciding not to send the case into arbitration, Judge Lackey, made the decision in December of 2007. This was not the only arbitration questions in the Third Circuit that fall…
Sometimes, like with the arbitration decision, the issue may be whether the concurring justice thinks the decision is worth a written opinion at all. The arbitration case turned on a fact question: Were markings on the page intended as a signature? The trial court found as a fact that it was not. The Supreme Court said that finding of fact was entitled to deference and affirmed. There is a good basis for a per curiam affirmance in those facts. Maybe Randolph and Dickinson (who are on opposite sides of arbitration at times) thought it should have stopped there.
The assignment of cases to the Court of Appeals is completely random. 1/4 of all cases remain with the Supreme Court, while the remaining end up in the Court of Appeals. There’s no real method to the selection. I’ve had double capital murder cases in the Court of Appeals and simple drug possession cases in the Supreme Court.