WHAT IS AN APPEAL?
An appeal is not a new trial. In an appeal, you do not have a chance to show a new judge or a new jury different evidence or even the same evidence.
It may help you understand appeals to think of a trial like a football game. The judge is like a referee. An appeal is like playing a video of the game and looking for places where a referee made bad calls. The bad calls sometimes don’t really make a difference about who won. Sometimes, however, the referees’ bad calls might decide the game.
Your appeal is about whether the judge at your trial made mistakes and about whether the mistakes probably helped the other side win. Your lawyer is looking for ways to persuade a higher court that the judge made such serious mistakes that you did not get a fair trial and should get a new trial or some other different outcome in your case. Another way of saying this is to say that the judge’s “errors” were “prejudicial.” Almost always, however, a trial lawyer has to let the judge know during the trial that the judge made a mistake for that mistake to be part of the appeal. Appeal courts don’t like to give new trials for something the judge didn’t have a chance to change because no one complained about it during the trial.
Of course, your appeal is not as simple as looking at a video, and it is certainly not part of a game. It is probably the most important thing in the world to you. However, thinking of the judge like a referee and an appeal like looking for the referee’s mistakes may help you better understand what is happening in your appeal.
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