Video: Why Appeals Expertise Is Critical When Choosing a Trial Attorney

Jennifer Anton | 00:05

Tell us why it is important when you’re going to trial that your trial attorney have expertise in the appellate process.

John Helms | 00:15

It’s actually really important that your trial lawyer have expertise in the appeals process and how appeals work for two main reasons. First of all, as a trial lawyer, you are counseling your client. About whether to plead guilty or whether to agree to a certain plea offer that the state or the government has made. And there are lots of times when you may think that you have a very good chance of winning at trial. Because you believe you’re going to be able to present some evidence and it’s going to be really persuasive to a jury Or you may believe that the state or the government is not going to be able to present certain evidence. And that’s going to be important. And it’s going to be important that the jury not hear it.

You have to understand not only how the trial judge might rule. But you have to understand how an appeals court might deal with the trial court’s ruling. Because you’re banking your prediction and your advice about what’s going to happen at trial and whether your client should take a plea offer based on not only what is likely to happen at trial, but could you get it overturned on appeal if something goes wrong? And so you have to be able to consider those things and take them into account when you’re counseling your clients. Even more important though, is that when you are a trial lawyer, and you are trying your case, you have to understand how to make sure that you do what you have to do to preserve errors in the trial court so that the Court of Appeals will even be willing to consider them.

So what do I mean by preserve errors? Trial if you think something happened that should not have happened. And you don’t object to it, then the judge is not alerted to the fact that you think something wrong happened. And so the judge can’t fix it. Or the judge can’t prevent it.

So the law says that as a trial lawyer, If you think that a question is going to call for an answer that The jury shouldn’t be allowed to hear. You have to object right then and there and you have to do it in the right way because if you don’t, the trial judge won’t have a chance to keep it out. And there are lots of different situations where something happens during a trial and maybe it happens all of a sudden and you might object to it. But you have to know that you’re going to have to ask the judge, to strike it from the record and instruct the jury not to consider it. And If you have some evidence that you want the jury to hear, But the trial judge is not let, You have to create a record that shows what the testimony or what the evidence would have been. You can’t just rely on the judge’s ruling if the record doesn’t show clearly what the evidence would have been.

So you may have to do something like when the jury is not in the courtroom, put a witness on the stand and have the witness testify so that it’s clear what the witness’s testimony would have been. That way, when the court of appeals looks at it, they can say, okay, now we know what the witness would have said. And yeah, that’d be really important. We need to reverse this. Otherwise, if they don’t know what the witness would have said, they’re not going to reverse it because they don’t know how important it was.

So you have to be able to preserve errors in those types of ways so that the Court of Appeals can even rule on the objections you make. If you make an objection.

So it’s always important to know how courts of appeal Consider different types of issues and to make sure that you know that the record you’re making, the court reporter’s transcript, is going to have all the information that the court of appeals will need in order to be able to review the question that you want them to answer. So those are the two most important reasons. And I can just tell you that I see a lot as an appellate lawyer, I see a lot of situations where I’ll lawyers in the middle of a trial and I get it. It’s hectic. You’ve got a million things going on in your mind, but they don’t preserve error in the right way. And it can just blow the appeal. So you need to know how to do it. You need to know when to do it. And you need to have some experience with appeals.

Jennifer Anton | 05:25

Well, John Helms, thank you for this informative information about the criminal appeals process. And how the law works in Texas and again, this is John Helms, Dallas criminal defense attorney, premier. Decades long practicing in Texas. And we appreciate your time.

John Helms | 05:45

Well, thanks very much for having me. It was my pleasure.

source: https://johnhelms.attorney/video-why-appeals-expertise-is-critical-when-choosing-a-trial-attorney/

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