re: #146 Targetpractice

My understanding over the years is that appeals court judges are generally loathe to second-guess the decisions of criminal court judges unless there is compelling evidence that they deliberately violated either court procedure or the law during the course of a trial. And since most of the actions that Chauvin’s lawyers tried to use as basis for a mistrial involved the decisions of the judge, they’d have to come up with than just “We didn’t like the outcome of the trial!”

I’m starting to understand the criminal appeals process, since it’s very different from appealing a civil case. Criminal appeals focus on a few key areas: Sufficiency of evidence (did the state really make their case), material errors (procedural fuckups that could have impacted the jury’s decision-making), and effectiveness of counsel. It takes a LOT to clear any of those hurdles, because all evidence presented in the appeal must be judged in light of the jury’s verdict. So if you try to argue that, for example, the defense’s medical examiner testimony should be weighted more strongly, the appellate court is literally not allowed to consider it, because it runs contrary to the verdict. You literally have to prove that the jury made an incorrect conclusion, based only on the facts that they used to convict in the first place. And the fact is, all those arguments were already tried once and failed to sway a jury of peers, so there has to be something egregiously wrong for an appeal to succeed.