What happens after an appellate court passes a case to the US Supreme Court in criminal case?

Answer 1

After a decision is handed down by a US Court of Appeals Circuit Court (in the federal system) or by the highest court in a state (for instance, the state's own supreme court) or is denied a hearing by the state supreme court, the loser can decide to appeal to the Supreme Court. The Court gets many thousands of appeals each year, but only agrees to take a handful of cases (by way of comparison, imagine the court picking 50 cases out of 6000 which are appealed).

When the Court decides to hear a case, a writ of certiorari is granted. Each set of lawyers (which often includes a bunch of other lawyers to whom the outcome of the case is important) write arguments called "briefs" and give them to the Court. The Court then hears oral arguments.

After that, they decide how they are going to vote and write the majority opinion (also called the opinion of the Court (if five or more agree) and concurring or dissenting opinions (if they cannot agree, or if individual justices disagree with the majority), which are released several months later.

(The US Supreme Court procedure is the same for criminal and civil cases.)

For more information, see Related Questions, below.