Improve your chance of successful Appeal
Pursuing an appeal is a difficult, time-consuming, and often times a losing endeavor. Despite all these headwinds, an appeal is the only method available to remedy the wrong that was committed at trial and to get you the justice that you deserve. You can however do a few things to increase your chances of success.
The number one thing that you can do is go to trial. Never plead guilty. A plea of guilty makes appealing your case much more difficult and in many cases it makes appealing impossible. According to appellate procedure, a plea of guilty waives all issues except jurisdiction. In fact, even meritorious defenses are waived following a guilty plea. After pleading guilty, the appellate rules require the defendant to file a motion to withdraw the plea of guilty. Such motions generally need to be filed within a certain timeframe of entering the plea. The appellate courts have consistently held that pleading guilty is a grave and solemn act because of this motions to withdraw a guilty plea are not routinely granted.
Aside from fighting your case at trial, the next thing that you can do to increase your chances of success is to retain an experienced appellate counsel as soon as possible. An appellate attorney will be able to prepare your motion for a new trial exponentially increasing the likelihood that your appellate arguments are properly preserved for appeal. The motion for a new trial is the basis for a winning direct appeal. A boilerplate motion for a new trial downloaded from the Internet, where only the defendant’s name is changed – a fact we see all the time, is a recipe for disaster. More often than not, boilerplate motions for a new trial directly result in appellate issues being waived for appeal because they either fail to argue relevant issues that apply to your case or they raise issues in generic terms, which are insufficient to preserve the issue for appeal. An experienced appellate lawyer will have the experience to identify the relevant issues and to analyze and discover case law that another attorney may not be able to find or realize its importance.
