Most people don't really understand that there is a huge difference between a trial and an appeal—trials focus on all of the allowable evidence and center around the facts in a case. Appeals center around the legalities of a case. Learn more about what the difference means and what sort of things you can expect an appellate attorney to review in your case.
The facts of a case are different from the legalities of the case.
The first jury's whole job was to look at all the evidence they had available, including the testimony of witnesses, and decide what the real facts of the case actually were. You can't get a new decision on the facts of a case until you (hopefully) win your appeal and get a new trial.
Instead, you ask the appellate court to find that there was some flaw in the legal proceedings that mattered enough to influence the jury's thinking and, ultimately, its decision. If your attorney is successful, then the case can go back to the trial court—where you can hopefully get a better outcome from the jury.
Appeals take a "from beginning to end" approach to try to win a reversal.
You can expect your appellate attorney to start looking for legal errors that were made at the very start of your case all the way to the end:
- Your arrest—if you were arrested after a search warrant was executed on your home and the police found your marijuana crop growing in a detached building in the back yard, that might make the warrant invalid. That would make your arrest and subsequent conviction invalid as well.
- The effectiveness of the trial attorney—it's important to remember that losing your case doesn't necessarily mean the attorney was ineffective. Instead, the court looks for things like whether or not your attorney made appropriate objections to evidence or lines or fully explained the consequences of accepting a plea deal to you before you made it.
- The conduct of the prosecution—appellate attorneys look for evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, like purposefully intimidating a witness or forgetting to pass potentially exculpatory evidence over to your defense in a timely manner.
- Issues with evidence—the evidence in your case can open up avenues of appeals. Sometimes an appeal is won when improper evidence was allowed into trial. Similarly, your attorney can argue that some important piece of evidence was excluded, depriving the jury of the ability to come to a fair decision about the facts.
- The judge's instructions to the jury—these are a frequent source of appeals. Before a jury begins deliberations, the judge will instruct them on what laws apply to the case and how to use that law to make their decisions. Sometimes appeals are granted on the smallest thing that a judge may have said. For example, a judge in a California used the word "delusion" instead of "hallucination" when instructing the jury on a case that involved an insanity plea. While the appeal was ultimately denied, it's a good example of how carefully an appellate attorney will scrutinize a record for errors.
- Jury conduct—jurors get examined in the review process as well. If there's any evidence that members of the jury talked with the prosecution directly or that one of them looked around on Facebook or some other website to see what decision most people thought the jury should make, it could be ground to grant an appeal.
- Sentencing errors—your attorney may argue that the judge in your case overstepped his or her authority by overriding the deal you had in place with a prosecutor, imposing a stiffer sentence. If there was no plea deal, but you're a first-time offender who gets the maximum sentence possible, your appellate attorney will look to see if there was bias on the part of the judge or some other factor at play.
For more information on how an appellate attorney can help you, please contact one in your area today, or go online to places like http://www.pedersonlawrc.com.
