Appeals

[Frodo]

@watchwolf49

That’s the Spanish word for “federal”, call it habit. Otherwise I’m pleading the Fifth …

It’s not. The Spanish word for “federal” is… “federal”, the plural is “federales” but the singular is “federal”

[watchwolf49]

@Frodo

It’s not. The Spanish word for “federal” is… “federal”, the plural is “federales” but the singular is “federal”

I don’t speak Spanish at all, thanks for the heads up.

[Pantastic]

@pianodave

Hi Pantastic,Well I hear these things in the news…most recently, Aroldis Chapman said if he was given a suspension for domestic violence from the Yankees, he’d appeal. Are these two situations at all alike?

That’s not even a court decision, he’s appealing a team or league decision up the private arbitration process.

But I’ve heard corporations say they’ll file an appeal plenty of times, when accused of wrongdoing. What about Apple and the phones of the San Bernardino shooters?

Apple is rightdoing in that case. One of the purposes of the courts is to reign in other parts of the government when they overstep their bounds.

And how do things change in high profile cases? Like, a serial killer who all the evidence points to gets off on procedural mismanagement.

Has there ever even been an actual case where that happened? You like using it as an example, but I’m not aware of a single serial killer who got off of a conviction because of ‘procedural mismanagement’.

Because of the amount of evidence against a serial killer and the vast number of crimes they commit, for a police department to actually screw up procedures enough to ruin a case like that, they must be constantly badly mishandling evidence and interrogations and routinely violating innocent people’s rights. I worry much more about the dozens to hundreds to hundreds of thousands of people with lives disrupted or in prison, or beaten, shot, and/or raped by that police department, since an awful police department can do vastly more damage than a single serial killer.

[watchwolf49]

@pianodave

[snip] … it sucks that people can get off on a technicality … [snip]

I don’t think this is ever true, a person can have their conviction overturned, but they can still be re-tried. An overturned conviction is never an acquittal. If the judge makes a mistake, it’s not a technicality, it’s a mistake. We don’t throw people into jail by mistake, or at least we try not to. The prosecutors don’t have to re-try the case, especially if the damning evidence is disallowed. The criminal gets off not by a technicality, rather by a lack of damning evidence … there’s a difference.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

An overturned conviction generally does function as an acquittal if the reason for the reversal is the sufficiency of the evidence; the government doesn’t get two bites of the cherry if they failed to carry their burden the first time.

[Bricker]

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

An overturned conviction generally does function as an acquittal if the reason for the reversal is the sufficiency of the evidence; the government doesn’t get two bites of the cherry if they failed to carry their burden the first time.

Correct.

Although I think it’s an apple.

But you’re exactly correct. An appeal that alleges insufficiency of the evidence is, if successful, an acquittal as a matter of law.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

Apple and cherry; in the end, we all fruit.

[watchwolf49]

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

An overturned conviction generally does function as an acquittal if the reason for the reversal is the sufficiency of the evidence; the government doesn’t get two bites of the cherry if they failed to carry their burden the first time.

Yes, many many times this is the result, but it’s an acquittal de facto, not an acquittal de jure. Double jeopardy comes into play if the defendant is found innocent, then indeed the government can’t prosecute for the same offense. That’s different if the case is dismissed without prejudice, for example a hung jury where neither guilt or innocent can be decided. Then the government can re-file the case without infringing the defendant’s rights.

[Northern_Piper]

@pianodave

If it’s painfully clear this is the case, that he is guilty, it sucks that people can get off on a technicality.

Please define what you mean by a “technicality”. It tends to have a very elastic meaning in these types of discussions, but often when you dig down, it means that the police or the prosecutor did not follow the law governing criminal process, either as set out in statute or in the Constitution.

A failure by a government official to follow the “Supreme Law of the Land” is not a technicality, in my opinion, especially when someone’s liberty is at stake…

[SpoilerVirgin]

@pianodave

A question about disallowed evidence. Can a jury really rationally decide someone’s not guilty by “forgetting” about evidence that was illegally obtained and therefore inadmissible? I mean, if it’s failrly obvious that the evidence convicts the person, a rational jurist is not going to just blank out that evidence, are they? They are already biased because they’ve seen this (illegally obtained) evidence. How does a jurist reconcile this? It must be an exercise in semantics. “Forget you ever saw this” doesn’t work in real life, in any situation. Right?

We discussed similar circumstances in a recent 5th Amendment thread, where I described my experience as a member of the jury in a murder trial:

We heard testimony from a man who was wearing an orange jumpsuit and shackles, and who initially refused to testify. We were told to draw no inferences from any of these circumstances, and in our deliberations, we considered him solely as a witness to the crime, and did not discuss his situation or reasons he might have had to testify. Of course it’s not possible to tell what was going on in the minds of the jury, but we did ultimately accept his testimony as valid and credible.

[kaylasdad99]

@friedo

Why do you keep writing Federale?

It’s his favorite type of court. They don’t make him show them no steenking badges!

[AK84]

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

This is not quite accurate. It is true that appellate courts do not reweigh evidence; they won’t have the evidence before them, but only the record of the proceedings. If the factfinder thinks one witness was credible and another was not, the appellate court will generally not revisit a ruling based on that finding. Even this is not an absolute rule, since an appellate court could reweigh evidence if its weight is apparent from the record itself (say, if a witness admitted that he could not have been present at the location he earlier testified he was in).

However, an appellate court does consider the evidence in addition to the law. For example, it will consider the sufficiency of the evidence: if the credible witness’ testimony was the only evidence, and it did not address one of the elements of the crime/tort/whatever, then a judgment that required that element to be found must be overturned.

Sufficiency of evidence is infact a point of law.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

@Northern_Piper

.
However, there is one major difference between the trial judge and the appellate judges. The trial judge is the one who has had the benefit of hearing the witnesses directly and has assessed their credibility. The trial judge is thus in the best position to make findings of fact.

Or the jury if there is one, in which case the trial judge is limited to deciding questions of law as they relate to the case. IANAL, but believe this is an important point. In a judge-only trial, it’s conceivable that the one person who is the fact-finder can err; errors exist in virtually all occupations and professions. But with a jury you have twelve fact-finders who usually can convict or acquit only by a unanimous vote. In the overwhelming majority of cases I doubt that all twelve jurors will come to an irrational decision, not withstanding the odd famous case where that has, in fact, happened. So the bar for winning an appeal must be quite high indeed.

[Tim_T-Bonham.net]

@pianodave

Thanks for this. A question about disallowed evidence. Can a jury really rationally decide someone’s not guilty by “forgetting” about evidence that was illegally obtained and therefore inadmissible? I mean, if it’s failrly obvious that the evidence convicts the person, a rational jurist is not going to just blank out that evidence, are they? They are already biased because they’ve seen this (illegally obtained) evidence. How does a jurist reconcile this? It must be an exercise in semantics. “Forget you ever saw this” doesn’t work in real life, in any situation. Right?

The point of all these legal arguments about whether certain evidence is ‘inadmissible’ is that the defense is trying to keep it from being ‘admitted’ into court in front of the jury. This is normally done before the jury ever sees it. If something comes up unexpectedly during a witnesses’ testimony, a lawyer will object, and the judge will send the jury out of the courtroom while the lawyers argue it before the judge, who then makes a decision. Then the jury is brought back in, and will hear or not hear that testimony.

That the trial judge erred in admitting some evidence that should have been excluded is one of the more common arguments in appeals.

[md2000]

Rodriguez v. United States

The question was, did the police officer detain the defendant as a traffic stop too long (to allow the sniffer dog to arrive) thus turning a “terry stop” situation into an arrest, which requires a more definite probably cause?

Writing for a majority of the Court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg held that “a police stop exceeding the time needed to handle the matter for which the stop was made violates the Constitution’s shield against unreasonable seizures.”[2] Consequently, a traffic stop becomes unlawful if “it is prolonged beyond the time reasonably required to complete the mission of issuing a ticket for the violation.”[25] Justice Ginsburg wrote that the purpose of the initial stop in this case was to investigate why Rodriguez swerved out of his lane of traffic.[26] Therefore, the officer’s authority to continue the stop ended once he completed his investigation of that infraction.[26] Because the dog sniff was unrelated to the investigation of the original traffic infraction, the officer should not have extended the stop absent “independently supported reasonable suspicion” for the dog sniff.[27] The Court then remanded the case to the Eighth Circuit to determine whether the officer did, in fact, have an independent basis for conducting the dog sniff.[3]

If the dog delay did not have “independent reasonable suspicion” then the drugs found are not admissible. Since that’s the only evidence of consequence, then likely without it, he walks. SO yes, the guy gets off on a trafficking charge with a “technicality”, but the technicality would be that the police officer just decided to hold him and search him based on his looks and his car freshener. Presumably the name “Rodriguez” does not figure into it in Nebraska?

One man’s technicality is another man’s fair justice.

[UltraVires]

An appeal is certainly not a “do over.” A loss at trial is a very, very huge defeat and depending on the legal issues, you may have little or no chance during appeal. Thinking, “Hey, I lost, but I’ve still got an appeal” is very wishful thinking.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus

IANAL, but believe this is an important point. In a judge-only trial, it’s conceivable that the one person who is the fact-finder can err; errors exist in virtually all occupations and professions. But with a jury you have twelve fact-finders who usually can convict or acquit only by a unanimous vote. In the overwhelming majority of cases I doubt that all twelve jurors will come to an irrational decision, not withstanding the odd famous case where that has, in fact, happened. So the bar for winning an appeal must be quite high indeed.

There really isn’t any deference offered to a jury verdict over the trial judge as factfinder in a bench trial.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

There really isn’t any deference offered to a jury verdict over the trial judge as factfinder in a bench trial.

Do you mean that there’s no substantive difference between the two types of verdict, in terms of the the appeals court granting the hearing or ultimately deciding in the appellant’s favor?

[Procrustus]

@Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus

Do you mean that there’s no substantive difference between the two types of verdict, in terms of the the appeals court granting the hearing or ultimately deciding in the appellant’s favor?

Correct. The appellate court will not disturb factual findings, (unless wholly unsupported by the evidence) following a bench trial or a jury trial. What the appeals court will do is review legal decisions made (concerning admissibility of evidence, for example) and decide if a new trial is warranted. Note, most cases have an appeal as a matter or right, so “granting the hearing” is not typically an issue. The appellate court will hear the appeal, but their review is limited to a review of legal decisions made by the judge, not factual findings by the court or jury.