Your life will change significantly once you’re convicted of a criminal offence. Sometimes, you need to deal with substantial fines, but it is also possible to face prison time, both of which can unsettle your personal and professional life. Therefore, it is important to use all your rights to see if you can get the verdict in your favor. And understand that appealing a conviction is your constitutional right, but the process surrounding federal appeals can be quite complicated which is why only an experienced appellate attorney can help you with that.
Here are a few reasons why you should seriously consider the idea of hiring an appellate attorney instead of sticking with your trial attorney.
Trial Advocacy is Different
An expert can tell you that appellate advocacy is a lot different as compared to trial advocacy. Therefore, if you think your talented trial attorney can still help you with your federal appeals, you’re not thinking on the right lines. Mostly, a trial attorney is only experienced in writing briefs like a closing argument and they won’t be in a position to ensure that your appeal turns out to be successful. Appellate judges can easily tell if they are listening to an oral argument presented by a trial attorney with no experience of appellate advocacy and that can have a negative impact on your case.
It is important to point out that though there is nothing restricting trial attorneys to handle your appeals, they need different skill-set, which is why you will be better off starting with an experienced appellate attorney from the word go.
So many times, the arguments that often sway juries fail to sway appellate judges. Moreover, there are fundamental differences in writing a memorandum of law and writing an appellate brief. Moreover, experienced appellate attorneys and lawyers are much more informed regarding changes in substantive law, and they also know the trends in an appellate court. Therefore, they are in a better position to get the verdict in your favor.
More Experience in Finding Appealable Issues
Another big reason to choose an appellate lawyer or attorney for federal appeals is that their experience enables them to find potentially appealable issues early on as compared to the time taken by a trial attorney. They react quickly and build their argument in a way that directly helps trial counsel in presenting evidence that would help you have a successful appeal.
Not only this, letting an experienced appellate attorney work on your case in place of your current trial attorney is a good idea because a “fresh set of eyes” can sometimes help open up new areas of argument to turn the verdict in your favor. It is even better to connect with an appellate lawyer at the trial court level, as it can go a long way towards signalling your adversary that you’re in it for the long run.
The fact of the matter is that it is wrong to assume everything’s lost after you don’t get a verdict in your favor. Yes, a federal criminal appeals process is tricky, but there’s still hope if you go for a conviction appeal and choose to work with an experienced attorney only.