What is an Appeal?
An appeal asks a higher court to review what happened in your case and decide whether a legal mistake was made. The court you appeal to depends on where your case started.
Utah has two types of criminal courts:
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Justice Courts, which appeal to the District Courts.
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District Courts, which appeal to the Utah Court of Appeals. Rarely, cases go straight to the Utah Supreme Court.
Two Types of Appeals
De Novo or Appeal of the Record
A justice court appeal is called a De Novo appeal, which means “new.” You do not challenge what happened in the lower court. Instead, the case starts over in district court with a brand new trial.
If you appeal a district court decision, you are asking the Court of Appeals to review the record of your trial and decide whether the judge made a legal error.
To win this type of appeal, you must:
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Identify a legal error in the trial record.
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Show that the error mattered and could have changed the outcome.
If you cannot show both, the appeal will not succeed. This explanation simplifies the process, but the core idea is the same: there must be a mistake, and the mistake must have made a difference.
Appealing the facts
Many people want to challenge the jury’s decision. This is possible, but it is one of the hardest paths to winning an appeal. You must show the appellate court that no evidence at all supported the jury’s finding. Only then can the court treat the jury’s decision as a legal error. Courts rarely overturn jury verdicts, which makes this approach difficult.
Costs
Appeals are expensive. You must create a full transcript of the trial, word for word, which can run thousands of pages and cost thousands of dollars. An attorney must then read the entire transcript to search for legal errors before beginning the long process of writing the appeal. This work often takes years, but it is usually the only path to overturning an unfair trial.