Steve Palmer [00:00:00]:

All right. LawyerTalkPodcast.com what's the appeal? You know, you get it. Sort of a pun. We talk about appeals. And what's the appeal of appeals? You get it. Anyway, what I do here is I cover issues relevant to the criminal appellate process, meaning somebody has been convicted, now they're climbing up the appellate ladder and they're trying to get their conviction overturned. I do a ton of appellate work in my practice, and I found I thought this would be really boring and nobody would like it, but I found people really enjoy these, so we're going to keep doing them. And I had a question that came up in my practice earlier this week.

Steve Palmer [00:00:33]:

And those who have followed this series know that I talk about the appellate ladders. And generally at the state court level, particularly here in Ohio, there are two ladders, and you've got to climb both ladders. Maybe not at the same time, but the appellate process is like a ladder, and there happens to be two. The first is a direct appeal, meaning we're going to challenge everything in direct appeal that I can read in the record, things that happened at trial. And then you have maybe an indirect appeal or post conviction habeas corpus type ladder, and that's everything. That's the opposite of that. Things that aren't in the record. I usually talk to clients about both when they call me.

Steve Palmer [00:01:09]:

Usually the direct appeal is the one that's on the plate first, but I always mention this other one. So I just happened to talk to a client who this happens every now and then, where the indirect appeal ladder seems like a better, a better or more likelihood of success, rather that we've got a good issue there, something happened outside the record that I can't raise on direct appeal. And they said, well, let's just skip the direct appeal. Or maybe another question would come up like, all right, we did the direct appeal. We lost in the Court of Appeals. Let's just skip the next step, which would be the Ohio Supreme Court, and go right over here to the indirect appeal or the post conviction ladder. Here's the problem, and there's good reason they asked that question, because it costs money. Each rung of the ladder is another thing that we have to do another chunk of legal work, another bit of research, another writing project, another step in the process, the slow, painful, arduous step up the appellate ladder.

Steve Palmer [00:02:08]:

And it makes sense. You would say, look, I want to allocate my resources over here to the post conviction side because we think we have a better chance of winning, as tempting as it may be. You can't do it. And here's why. Ultimately, these ladders, there's like stages of ladders, we'll say, if anybody remembers the old Mario game where he would run up the ladders and he would get to different platforms and you get to the next screen and then there's more ladders. It's like that. So the first screen is the state appellate system, and we're going to go up those ladders. Mario's going to climb those ladders all the way to the top.

Steve Palmer [00:02:43]:

And the problem is you can't go to the next screen or the federal screen. So you lose everything in the state or you complete that screen and you want to go to the appellate level in federal court, particularly something called habeas corpus. Federal habeas corpus. If you have skipped a step, if you jumped over one of the rungs on the ladder on either side of things, then you're going to be deemed procedurally defaulted. The feds won't let you raise that issue. In habeas corpus, you have to give the state court level at each step, each rung of the ladder, a chance to deny you and say no. Or rather, a chance to grant relief if relief is warranted. And if you skip one of those steps, the federal court sure enough will deem that to be defaulted.

Steve Palmer [00:03:30]:

And then you can't do anything in federal court on habeas corpus. It is hyper technical, folks. These are hyper technical issues. If you skip something, if you don't raise something, if you don't cite federal law, then you're gonna get thrown out of court when you get to the feds. And there's nothing more frustrating than when I take a case over and somebody has skipped steps at the state court level. And, you know, I hear this all the time, like, wouldn't it save money? Yeah, it would, but you can't. And it sucks. I get it.

Steve Palmer [00:03:55]:

But you have to take each step of the appellate ladder. So anyway, if you've got an appellate question, shoot it to me. If you've got your own appeal you want us to work on, we're happy to look at it. Palmer Legal Defense. Otherwise, Lawyer Talk podcast off the record, on the air till now.