Alright, Steve Palmer here bringing another Lawyer Talk Q-A-A.

Session. And if you haven't tuned into these and

subscribe to Lawyer Talk podcast, you should, because what we're doing here is

answering legal questions, things that come up not only in my day to day law

practice upstairs, but also on the podcast and on the Blitz nine, nine, seven.

The idea is to give you access to answers

to questions without having to listen to the entire podcast.

Now questions are coming in, as I said,

not only upstairs in my law practice, and what I'll do sometimes is I'll take a

question that I get on the phone from an actual client or somebody who wants to be

a client, and I'll change the names and the identities to protect the innocent, so

to speak, and then use it as a question down here.

Also at Lawyer Talk podcast. Com.

We get questions fairly routinely.

You can go to Lawyer Talk podcast. Com.

There is a form you use.

I get the email and you can submit your question that way.

And as always, if you have a legal question that requires legal assistance or

you just want to chit chat, give us a shot.

614-224-6142.

Not that you're going to need the number, but it may be a good idea just to put it

on your phone in case you do ever experience unexpected trouble.

Now to the question for the day.

It so happens.

And I've said this on the podcast.

If you listen, I'm working on lots of appellate work these days.

This is where people have been convicted

by trial by jury, otherwise, sometimes just a judge,

and now they want to appeal their conviction and try to get it reversed.

I am talking here today about something called a direct appeal.

This is where you're challenging the legal

mistakes, the errors that occur during your trial at the trial court level.

And the question I got

yesterday as I finalized an A pellet brief for a client was basically this will the

Court of appeals get all the records and the exhibits and everything else that was

done at the trial court level, and the answer is generally yes.

What happens is at the trial court level.

When we start an appeal, we request the

court reporter that's the person who's in charge of either recording the proceeding.

Sometimes it's just audio or video now, but often it's a stenographer upfront,

taking shorthand of everything that is said and done.

We request that individual to

submit the record to the Court of appeals, and the record includes not only

everything that was said and done on the record, getting recorded

in the courtroom, but also the things that were filed.

So pretrial motions, entries, decisions out of the judge,

anything that was submitted and included in the trial court record.

Usually you can even see that online these days.

This also would include exhibits.

So if the defense offered an exhibit or

the prosecutor often exhibit, and the jury got to see that exhibit or take it back.

Or even if not, it typically becomes part of the record that gets transmitted.

Now, this is important because anything on direct appeal has to be raised only based

on things in the record, only based on things that are there.

If there's mistakes made out outside the record, saying your Attorney's office or

strategic decisions that weren't really strategic or just general failures out of

your counsel, or maybe you got a brand new witness that showed up after the trial.

These are things that do not come up on direct appeal.

There's something different for that.

It's called post conviction.

We're not getting into it today.

But with respect to the direct appeal, all the record items have to be transmitted.

And the other reason this is important is because in the context of an appellate

brief and the one I'm working on now has a page limit of 25 pages.

It is a very complicated case with

multiple legal and technical issues relative to the admission of evidence, the

admission of expert testimony and general mistakes made by trial Council.

It's very difficult to raise all this in only 25 pages and do it thoroughly.

You can sometimes ask for additional

page length, but we want to try to avoid doing that.

The Court of Appeal says, look, we don't

like long brief, so let's not give them a long brief.

Sometimes there's no choice, but we try to stick within the rules.

Now, that doesn't mean we can't reference

things that are in the record, and that's exactly what we do.

We use the appendix sometimes just to

duplicate things that day, being the Court of Appeals could go see in the record.

And other times we we just cite the record

and we direct the Court of Appeals to the source material we're relying on as we

make our arguments in the case I'm working on.

There's some complicated expert reports in the page limits.

I have it's hard to duplicate those or

even take excerpts from those and still stay within the limit.

So what we do is we either put them in the

appendix or we just cite them from the record.

And that way the court has access to it.

So as you're working with your attorney or

Appel lawyer, these are good questions to ask.

And what I always try to do is get a draft in advance to my clients of what I'm

raising the issues that we're presenting for the Court of Appeals to consider, and

even if it's just a day or two in advance just to let them know, hey, look, here's

what we're doing here's, why we're doing it, and here's how we're doing it.

And that's, in fact, how this question came up for my client this week.

Anyway, on direct appeal, you raised in summary, only things that are on the

record, not things that are outside the record.

We're looking for legal mistakes.

We're looking for decisions judges made in response to objections.

Maybe they excluded evidence, maybe they permitted evidence.

They shouldn't have anything along those lines.

That's what we're looking for on direct appeal doesn't mean that other stuff

cannot be raised, but just not on direct appeal.

Now, one final comment.

If you do lose your direct appeal, let's say you lose.

And this is Ohio we're talking about.

There's also a pellet work in federal courts.

Again, beyond the short bite that we're taking here out of this topic.

But if you lose, then you go to the Ohio

Supreme Court and you ask the Ohio Supreme Court, and I say, ask them to review it.

They don't have to.

So the first step is to say, hey, look, Ohio Supreme Court, this is a great issue.

It's got a broad scope.

It's got big constitutional issues.

There's conflicts of legal decisions here in Ohio.

We need you to resolve it.

If they agree, if they think it is

important or they do need to resolve something, then they agree to review it,

and then you submit a brief on the merits of it.

Now, if you win in the court of appeals,

it's probably worthy of comment to discuss what happens if you win.

Most of the time.

They just send it back to the trial court and say, hey, you guys screwed up.

You didn't do this right here's.

The mistakes you made.

This person gets a new trial, or this

person gets a new sentencing hearing or whatever the remedy would be.

In very rare cases, there's insufficient evidence for some legal reason.

Or maybe the verdicts were just so far afield from what the evidence showed that

the court appeals just says, you know what?

This is against the manifest way of the

evidence, and we reverse it, and then you just get discharged in the case is over.

That's a rare bird, though most of the

time, if you went in the court of appeals, you go back to the trial court and you get

a do over and you get a retrial, hopefully this time with better success.

So anyway, if you have your own questions

about Apple work or anything else, just give us a shout.

614-224-6142 likewise, Ohio Legal Defense.

Com that's the Aegean Almer website. I know it's funny.

It doesn't say Abagnale. Com.

It says Ohio Legal Defense. Com.

But there's some reason for that.

Go to Ohio Legal Defense. Com.

Send us an email if you have some

questions or concerns about your own legal matter.

If you just want to talk about podcast

questions, you can go to Lawyer Talk Podcast.

Com.

And if you want your own podcast, it's probably worthy of mention.

Just go to channel. 511.

Com down here in the studio.

Lots of people are starting to sign up for podcast.

I think it's becoming.

And we thought this a year and a half ago

or two years ago, but now it's really becoming the next greatest thing.

Everybody wants a podcast and everybody

out to have one, and it ought to sound awesome and come with great production.

We can help. So this has been Lawyer Talk a Q.

Amp a with Steve Palmer, as always, off the record.

But on the air with your questions, at least until now.