If Judge Y is hearing an appeals case from a prisoner, can he consult Judge X who sentenced the prisoner?
You should not need to.
All the evidence presented at the trial will be in the court record, as will the information gathered in the pre-sentence investigation.
That is the evidence the appellate judge is supposed to use in making the decision.
I know that an appeal can not present new issues, ones that weren’t presented at the original trial. We’ll have to wait for a lawyer to see if that applies to actual contact with the original judge. I’d be tempted to say it would be considered improper. After all, what can the original judge tell you that isn’t in the trial record? And if there is something important, than why wasn’t it in the trial record?
This strikes me as a general rule and not as an absolute truth. For example, say your wife goes missing and you’re subsequently convicted of her murder. After your conviction, she shows up alive and well. I daresay that would be new information and probably grounds for an appeal.
Trial records are occasionally accidentally destroyed. I recently discovered this when requesting the transcript of a trial and was told by the courthouse that it had been destroyed in a fire. In such circumstances it may be necessary to consult the original judge and lawyers to get the information you need.
New evidence is a factual matter. Generally, there will be an attempt to get the original trial court to overturn the verdict or order a new trial. Only if this is denied might it become a question of law for an appeals court to address.
An appeal is nearly always on a matter of law (issues of fact only showing up in the legal question of whether they were admissible). I’d hesitate to say you can never appeal a matter of fact, as if there is one the Dopers-at-Law will gleefully identify the odd situation where you can – but I’ll hazard a guess that such occasions are vanishingly rare if at all extant.
Also, ordinarily there’s a time limit for perfecting an appeal that makes the famous “courthouse burned down” (What is it with burning courthouses, anyway? Are the durn things fire hazards?) situation quite unlikely.
Finally, prima facie evidence that no crime was committed, such as the purported victim of a murder turning up alive and well (in the absence of a sworn statement from Jesus of Nazareth, Elisha, the Buddha, et al. that one of them was going around bringing the dead to life recently) would be grounds for vacating a sentence. Separate legal process.
Well, not gleefully, but yes, there can be appeals on issues of fact.
It all depends on the statute setting out the right of appeal. Some rights of appeal are expressly limited to questions of law, while others are a general right of appeal, including the entire decision below. However, appellate courts normally take a very deferential approach to findings of fact by the trial judge, and will not normally overturn them. In Canada, the standard of review on appeal for findings of fact is that the learned trial judge made “palpable and overriding errors” in the assessment of facts: H.L. v. Canada (Attorney General), [2005] 1 S.C.R. 401, 2005 SCC 25. This is a very high standard to meet. The reason for this approach is that the trial judge heard the testimony and assessed the credibility of the witnesses. The appeal court cannot hear the witnesses, so will generally give deference to the trial judge.
By contrast, for questions of law, the usual standard on appeal is “correctness” - the appeal court has the same powers to determine questions of law as the trial judge, so can overturn the trial judge if the trial judge got the law wrong.
This is all on the civil side. Criminal appeals are more complicated.
NP is correct that appeals derive from some legislative or constitutional provision, which will say what can and cannot be appealed by whom.
I’m having a hard time coming up with a situation in which an appellate court would need or wish to contact the court whose decision it is reviewing. Most often, appeal is on the record - is the decision below “acceptable” in light of the evidence that was before that decision-maker. To the extent new evidence exists, it will generally get you a new proceeding at the lower court, not a favorable decision by the appellate court.
(My practice these last 20 years - and any expertise I may have - concerns civil appeals in the US federal courts concerning a very limited subject matter.)
Canada’s approach sounds almost precisely like the U.S.'s. An appellate court reviews the record of the trial, and may not consider anything outside the record. They review a trial court’s findings of fact with great deference, and will not accept them only if they are patently incredible, or have no support whatsoever in the record. Conclusions of law are reviewed de novo - anew, afresh, with no particular deference.
As ascenray correctly points out, this is not grounds for appeal – it is something to take to the trial court as a request to vacate the conviction, or as evidence in a habeas petition.
To quibble (because that’s what we lawyers do–and I’m working on this issue in an appeal right now), there is one category of things outside the record (legal term: dehors the record) that an appellate court may consider: matters of which the court may take “judicial notice.” These usually include laws and government records, court records in other proceedings, and matters of common knowledge (e.g. October 23 was a Tuesday in the year at issue).
Another quirk is in the ever-wierd New York court system. Our court of general jurisdiction (where large civil and criminal cases are heard) is known as the Supreme Court (technically the trial term of the Supreme Court), which is the equivalent level to the federal District Court in the federal system. Appeals from the Supreme Court are heard by New York’s intermediate appellate court, Appellate Division (technically the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court), which is equivalent to the federal Courts of Appeal. New York’s highest court is the New York Court of Appeal, which is the equivalent in the state hirearchy to the U.S. Supreme Court in the federal. I won’t bore you with the numerous special and lower-level trial courts in New York, and the various paths that appeals from them may be pursued up the appellate chain.
Unlike most other appellate courts, the Appellate Division is not limited to correcting errors of law (including findings of fact unsupported by the record and abuses of discretion). Instead (at least on the civil side–I know nothing of criminal), it has the virtually unlimited power to substitute its own findings of fact, conclusions of law, and exercise of discretion for that of the trial court. In practice, however, in most instances the Appellate Division gives great deference to the findings of fact and discretionary acts of the trial court. Sometimes, however, they will go off and do their own thing. The Court of Appeal, however, is very strictly a law court only, and takes quite seriously its lack of power to displace factual findings of the court below.