Opinion ID: 2382004
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Stay Pending Appeal Standard of Review

Text: Pursuant to Supreme Court Rule 32(a), A stay or injunction pending appeal may be granted or denied in the discretion of the trial court, whose decision shall be reviewable by this Court. Accordingly, this Court must review the Superior Court's refusal to stay the Commission's revocation decision in this case for abuse of discretion. [1] In reviewing Kirpat's motion for a stay of the Commission's revocation decision pending appeal to this Court, the Superior Court applied the four-prong Evans v. Buchanan [2] test which requires the reviewing court: (1) to make a preliminary assessment of likelihood of success on the merits of the appeal; (2) to assess whether the petitioner will suffer irreparable injury if the stay is not granted; (3) to assess whether any other interested party will suffer substantial harm if the stay is granted; and (4) to determine whether the public interest will be harmed if the stay is granted. [3] The Superior Court concluded that Kirpat did not make a strong showing that it was likely to succeed on the merits of the appeal. The Superior Court, therefore, denied Kirpat's motion for a stay without analyzing any of the three remaining factors of the four-prong test. We find the Superior Court's analysis to be incomplete. By narrowly focusing only on Kirpat's likelihood of success on appeal, the Superior Court failed to consider all of the relevant factors together to determine where the appropriate balance should be struck. [4] As the federal district court in Evans v. Buchanan noted, the likelihood of success on appeal prong cannot be interpreted literally or in a vacuum when analyzing a motion for stay pending appeal. [5] A motion for stay, unlike a petition for preliminary injunction, requires the trial court to analyze the likelihood of success on appeal after the trial court already has considered and issued its final determination on the merits of the case. Requiring a literal reading of the likelihood of success on appeal standard would lead most probably to consistent denials of stay motions, despite the immediate threat of substantial irreparable injury to the movant because the trial court would be required first to confess error in its ruling before it could issue a stay. [6] We find that a more reasonable approach to this issue is to balance all of the equities involved in the case together. [7] Such an approach means that the necessary degree of probability of success on the merits of the appeal will vary from case to case and will vary according to the court's assessment of the other factors. [8] If the other three factors strongly favor interim relief, then a court may exercise its discretion to reach an equitable resolution by granting a stay if the petitioner has presented a serious legal question that raises a fair ground for litigation and thus for more deliberative investigation. [9] Such an approach accords with the general trend in other jurisdictions away from a literal mathematical probability requirement. [10] Turning now to an application of those standards to the present case, we conclude that Kirpat has raised a serious legal question and that the hardship factors weigh heavily in favor of maintaining the status quo.