You are a criminal defense attorney and your client has just been found guilty by a US district court in Illinois What are your options for appeal and describe the appeals to the supreme court?

Answer 1

I am not a criminal defense attorney. Still, You have a chance for a direct appeal. Basically, a simplistic look at the way it works is, "The Judge supervises the lawyers and the court of appeals supervises the judge."

There are the charges. There is a record of the trial. There is the Judge's instructions to the jury. There is the verdict. There is the sentencing. The judge supervised all of that. If the judge did not throw out evidence related to the charges or throw out charges not supported by the evidence, or do his job in some other way, that can go to the court of appeals.

An appeal court attorney looks through the transcript. If he sees items that look wrong, he writes them up and sends the appeal to the Appeals court.

The Appeals court reviews the brief. It may or may not reverse the trial court on one or more issues. For example, a person may have been convicted on 10 counts. The appeal court may decide the evidence only supports 7 of the convictions. It will reverse and remain 3 of the convictions. That means the prosecutor will need to decide if he will prosecute those 3 in a new trial. Usually he does not.

After that decision is made, if one or more of the convictions were the same as those reviewed by other appeal courts, and those decisions differed, then the US Supreme Court might become involved.

The 9th Circuit (extremely liberal) may have decided one way, while the 5th Circuit (extremely conservative) decided the other way. The 10th Circuit (somewhat conservative) may have surprised someone. As different Courts of Appeal decide the same issues in different ways, someone calls on the US Supreme Court to resolve the issues. (The Supreme Court does not take easy cases.) Thus, the Supreme Court picks its issues. Most appeals are cert. denied. That simply means it refused to decide between the different rulings. Some are simply p c a. Which means the Appeal court ruling stands.

Most criminal convictions never make it to the US Supreme Court.

Those are trial court and direct appeals. Remember how I said the Judge supervises the Lawyers. There are a different category of appeals called Collateral Appeals.

If your lawyer refused to discuss the trial with you before you met in court or he came to court drunk. You can tell the judge in a collateral appeal.

If you discover the prosecutor committed a crime and had a witness commit perjury, you can bring that up on a collateral appeal. You get one of those to the trial court. You will need to bring up everything.

There are other things you can bring up.