Snowball's Chance Around the Supreme Court's Campfire

I know that we have all waited with baited breath for the next bit of PZLDF news and sadly, there is nothing yet to report. But there is some interesting background information around this sort of case, which left the Second District Appellate Court on December 5, 2012 and was officially received by the California Supreme Court on December 11, 2012, as a "Petition for Review."

There is a lot of riveting information in the 181 page Court Statistics Report linked here, but I will just toss out the tastiest morsels to slowly roast over the campfire:

PETITION FOR REVIEW. A petition for review is filed in the California Supreme Court to ask that court to exercise its discretion to review a decision issued by a Court of Appeal in an appeal or an original proceeding. The Supreme Court has a total of 90 days to consider a petition for review, after which it loses jurisdiction. If apetition for review is granted by the Supreme Court then full briefing occurs on the case; if a petition is deniedthen the judgment of the lower court becomes final as to the case.

petition for review A request for Supreme

Court review of a Court of Appeal decision.

petition for review denied An order by the

Supreme Court declining review of a Court of

Appeal decision.

petition for review granted An order by the

Supreme Court granting review of a Court of

Appeal decision.

                                                                               

petition for review granted and held An order                        

by the Supreme Court granting review of a Court

of Appeal decision that will be held for final action

until a lead case addressing a related issue has

been decided by the Supreme Court.

petition for review granted and transferred

An order by the Supreme Court granting review of

a Court of Appeal summary denial in an original

proceeding and transferring review of the case to

a Court of Appeal for further proceedings.

request for publication or depublication

A case in which the sole relief requested is for the

Supreme Court to order that a Court of Appeal

decision be either published or depublished.

Page 31 has an interesting statistic for the year 2010-2011; just 5% of the cases submitted were granted a review. One would assume then, that 95% were NOT granted a review.

On Friday, the first 30 days will have expired from the jurisdictional time clock. Of course, we do not know if this means working days or calendar days, so we will need to be extra patient if this drags out longer than 90 days.

I'm sure those PZLDFers slated to begin payments to the Water Board if this case does not get picked up by the Supremes (and in crude language, "won") must be dancing a toastie-footed jig right about now as they are pretty close to the campfire flames (years of Water Board Court costs must be at least in the hundreds of thousands by now). But they, like us, will just have to wait and see...."Citizens in Boiling Water" comes to mind.