Under the convoluted law governing habeas corpus, which is the procedure by which federal courts review state-court criminal sentences, an inmate who loses a case before a federal district judge does not have an automatic right to appeal. The district judge or federal appeals court must first grant a “certificate of appealability,” reflecting a finding that the issue to be appealed is one on which reasonable judges can come to different conclusions. In this case, the Fifth Circuit refused to grant the certificate to the inmate, Duane Edward Buck. Seeking to place the court’s refusal in context, Mr. Buck’s lawyers at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund undertook a study of how several federal circuits that dealt regularly with death penalty cases handled this gate-keeping function.

The difference among the courts, documented in an appendix to Mr. Buck’s Supreme Court brief, was startling. Going back for the last five years, courts in the Fourth Circuit (based in Richmond, Va., and covering Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas) granted certificates of appealability in all 12 capital habeas corpus appeals. Courts in the 11th Circuit (based in Atlanta and covering Georgia, Florida and Alabama) granted certificates in 104 out of 111 cases. Courts in the Fifth Circuit, by contrast, received 129 appeals and granted certificates in only 53, denying 60 percent of the requests. While Mr. Buck’s lawyers didn’t make this point, the Fourth and Eleventh Circuits, unlike the Fifth Circuit, both have Democratic-appointed majorities. Should that matter when it comes to the life-or-death decisions at issue in these cases? No. Does it matter? The statistics speak volumes.

Most judicial vacancies occur under what is known as the rule of 80: Federal judges who turn 65 are eligible for senior status once their age and their years of service total at least 80. In his recent statistical study, Russell Wheeler of Brookings calculated how many judges now serving on the circuit courts would be eligible for senior status by 2020. The total was 98 of the 179 judgeships on those courts. Of the 98, 48 are Democratic appointees. “If Trump replaced all 48 eligible Democratic appointees, every court of appeals would become a Republican-appointee majority court,” Mr. Wheeler wrote. He added “that’s not going to happen” — presumably because many of those newly eligible judges would choose to remain in active service for years to come. On the federal districts courts, 216 judges are currently eligible for senior status or will become eligible by mid-2020. Most of those, 61 percent, are Republican appointees; some number of those currently eligible have perhaps been waiting for the outcome of the election before deciding whether to exercise their right to reduce their workload and create a vacancy. In any event, the numbers are substantial, as is the new administration’s opportunity to shift the direction of the entire federal judiciary. The coming Supreme Court nomination may be mesmerizing, but it shouldn’t deflect attention from the full picture.

I can’t end this column without shifting gears for a word about North Carolina’s governor, Pat McCrory, and his long-delayed concession this week to his Democratic opponent, Roy Cooper, the state’s attorney general. For weeks after losing his bid for re-election, despite trailing by growing margins, Governor McCrory refused to concede. Instead, he claimed voter fraud. Turns out there was no voter fraud, but rather, according to polling commissioned by the Human Rights Campaign, voter fatigue with his anti-gay and anti-transgender shenanigans that brought the state embarrassment and lost business. (Governor McCrory received 63,000 fewer votes than Donald Trump.)

It was in the name of preventing voter fraud that Governor McCrory championed North Carolina’s oppressive new election law, the law that the Fourth Circuit struck down this summer as a deliberate attempt to suppress the vote of African-Americans. There was no demonstrable voter fraud, the appeals court found, describing the law as a solution to a non-problem. If there was poetic justice in any election outcome this year, Governor McCrory’s defeat surely was it.