Steve Palmer [00:00:00]:

Steve Palmer here from Lawyer Talk Podcast. You can check us out at lawyertalkpodcast.com. For those who have been following, I've started a new series. It's called What's the Appeal? And the idea here is to give people some insight about what they do after they've been convicted and they want to appeal. And why am I doing this? Well, maybe I'm a little bit selfish here because I do a lot of this kind of work upstairs in my law practice, Palmer legal defense, not only in Ohio, but in federal courts all over and even some state courts, throughout the country. Today, I'm gonna talk about what we all sort of understand to be the traditional appeal. You've just been convicted and you want to appeal. It's called a direct appeal.

Steve Palmer [00:00:35]:

So this is coming right out of the trial court conviction into the next level court of appeals. In different states call these different things. In Ohio, we just call it a court of appeals. Other states, have different terms for it, but we're talking directly from your trial court conviction to the court of appeals. Now in Ohio and in most places, you can only raise mistakes. So by raise mistakes, I mean, argue errors, argue that the trial court screwed up, argue that your conviction is somehow not valid based on what we can read in the record. So direct appeal, we can read it in the record. And what I like to do is talk to people about different ladders.

Steve Palmer [00:01:12]:

So we're and we'll we'll get to these other ladders in different in later episodes, but we're talking about one ladder here that is for your direct appeal. And we're gonna start climbing that ladder up on direct appeal, and the first step is the Court of Appeals. We raise, as I said, issues, legal mistakes, things I can read in the record. What's the record? Well, the record is the transcript at trial. The record may be things that that, the lawyers filed before trial and argued in pretrial trial hearings. The record could be exhibits that were submitted, by the prosecutor or the defense lawyer during trial, and we're looking for maybe evidentiary mistakes. Mistakes maybe, if you heard objection and the judge said overruled, or sustained. If it didn't go your way, that's a mistake that we raise.

Steve Palmer [00:01:58]:

So if the judge let evidence in that you think the judge shouldn't have let in or the judge didn't let evidence in that you were trying to get in, those are the kind of mistakes we raise on direct appeal. And maybe the best way to put it is is to talk about the opposite, what we can't raise on direct appeal. What you can't raise on direct appeal are things that I can't read in the record. In other words, if you think your attorney should have called a witness and there's no record of that in the transcript or in any pretrial filings. Well, that's not there's no place for that on this direct appeal ladder. There's another place for it. We'll get to it, but not here. So only mistakes that we can read about, and then we can brief it.

Steve Palmer [00:02:35]:

In other words, write a report about it, submit it to the court of appeals, and argue it. And that's how we perfect our direct appeal. There's lots more to come, and I can get far more detail about it, and I will. But, that that's direct appeal in a nutshell, right here on lawyer talk, what's the appeal. If you got a question, by the way, if you want us to cover something here at the table, check us out, lawyertalkpodcast.com, where we are off the record on the air with What's the Appeal?, at least until now.