Hi everybody it's Andy and welcome again to my office in Los Altos California. I'm
an attorney licensed to practice law in California as well as New York. In this
video I'm going to go over appeals of court cases so before I do that, though,
I'm gonna qualify here,of course, that, um, this video is going to be maybe eight
minutes, 10 minutes something like that.
Appeals generally are a very, very kind of complicated subject area. There are
lawyers who spend their entire careers doing appeals, lawyers, law firms rather,
who do nothing but appeals. Judges who do nothing but appeals so I certainly don't
mean to be exhaustive comprehensive in this video, but i do hope to, kind of,
educate the public a little bit about one common kind of belief about appeals
that ends up not being true in most cases. So i will set the stage for you
guys like this. So let's say that an individual is involved in a court case
and maybe they're doing it themselves, may be the case is more complicated than
they thought, maybe, um, the lawyer they hired is actually not so great after all.
Basically for some reason like the person is discouraged about how the case
is going and they're thinking of themselves 'Hey, you know, I think I'm
going to lose this because, you know, the judge didn't seem to like me. The jury
didn't seem to like me. I lost this ruling, etc. Somewhere in that mix
the individual kind of gets the idea that 'Hey, you know, if I lose here it's no
big deal because I'll just appeal and just start all over again. Everything
will be fine. I'll just kind of focus my energy over there, uh, and in general that is
not how it works.
So an appeal sometimes will be considered a do-over, like you actually
do literally start from square one again, but in the vast majority of cases you
don't. So believing that, you know, if you lose at one level, like at trial for
example, you can just appeal and kind of do it over again believing that is
actually very, very dangerous because, in general, you cannot start over. If you
appeal, you can do somethings over again but not everything. You will be
stuck with some of the things that the prior judge decided or ruled upon. So
that's kind of the the short answer. The longer answer I can give it to you also
it's no big deal.
The longer answer, though, is that you need to understand the difference
between two things: the first is fact and the second
is law so I'll illustrate both of those with a kind of drunk driving
example, I guess, because that's fairly kind of easy to understand unfortunately.
So a fact in a drunk-driving case might be what happened. So, for example, was this
person intoxicated, what was their blood alcohol level, how many drinks did this
person have before getting in the car, when did they have these drinks, where
did they have them, etc. So if you think of a fact a fact, as you can probably guess,
I guess, from the name, a fact is something that actually happened. A fact
will be determined by, you know, evidence, documents, videotape, witnesses who saw
the thing happen, experts who can, kind of, opine on why something happened that
way versus something else, etc. So a like a fact is gonna be something that
occurred kind of in the real world. So law, though, is going to be the
significance of whatever fact actually happened.
So, for example, going back to the drunk driver example, a fact might be
how many drinks did this person have in the two hours or three hours before they
got behind the wheel.
So based on that, you know, the fact another fact will be what their blood
alcohol level was. The law will be what is the significance of that particular
blood-alcohol level, for example. So in California intoxication is 0.08 or
higher
so if, you know, the fact is that 'Oh this person's blood alcohol level was 0.09'
the law aspect, the significance of that fact is that 'Oh, 0.08 and above
means means you are drunk and if your blood alcohol level, the fact here, is
0.09, that means, you know, the significance of that is that you are drunk under the
law.' So fact, on one hand, is what actually occurred, what can be proven, and law is
the significance of what actually happened with that fact. So that
distinction is important to understand because in the vast majority of cases
when you appeal you are stuck with the facts from below.
In other words if the earlier trial judge, you know, had a bunch of witnesses,
examined a bunch of witnesses, reviewed a bunch of evidence, etc., that judge will have
come to a set of factual conclusions
that will determine
'Yes the light was red, you know, No this person wasn't drunk' stuff like that. So
if you appeal in the vast majority of cases you will be stuck with what the
facts are. The prior judges' rulings about what actually happened will remain.
The law, however, the law that the trial judge applied down below over here,
that law will be applied brand new. So the thing is the reason why people
appeal is 'Mr. appeal judge, we don't disagree with what actually occurred
we think that the trial judge applied the wrong cases, they interpreted these
cases incorrectly, something like that. That's the reason why you appeal because
you allege that the trial judge applied the wrong law, applied the
law incorrectly and, as a result, reached an incorrect conclusion. You generally do
not appeal alleging that the trial judge got the facts wrong, you can it's no big deal,
but the standard that you have to meet there is very, very high. You
basically have to show that the trial judge abused their discretion and that
there is no way for any kind of, you know, competent judge sitting in that same
situation to have decided the facts as this particular judge did. Those types of
appeals, though, are fairly rare. I would generally not recommended appealing based
on that, unless the situation was very, very unique. In general, when you appeal
you should appeal because the law in your case was applied incorrectly or the
wrong law was applied.
Yeah so the kind of take away from all of this, I guess, is that if you
appeal you are generally going to be stuck with the facts from below. So to
think that you are basically going to appeal and get a chance to start all
over again with the clean slate, so to speak, is generally not correct and it's
very very risky actually to do it that way to to think that way.
So again hopefully that wasn't too confusing. Appeals, like I said, are very,
very involved, very complicated.
I don't do them and they are a kind of specialized area, I guess. You definitely
need somebody, need a lawyer who does appeals all the time to really help you
if you are in a situation where an appeal is, you know, likely or warranted.
So, again, hopefully that wasn't too confusing and I will talk to you
guys next time. Thanks.