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A defendant convicted of a misdemeanor or felony charge in the
Superior Court after a trial is entitled to
APPEAL the conviction to the Rhode
Island Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is the highest court in
the state. The Public Defender represents indigent defendants
on appeal. An appeal to the Supreme Court must be filed within
20 days of the sentencing in the Superior Court. It generally
cannot be filed late and it never may be filed more than 50 days
after Superior Court sentencing. There is a complicated way to
obtain review by the Supreme Court if a defendant, with a good
enough excuse, fails to file for an appeal in time, but it takes
an attorney familiar with Supreme Court practice to do that.
An appeal is very different from a trial. An appeal consists
of legal arguments to the appeals judges only: there is no testimony,
no witnesses, and only the attorneys involved may not speak to
the judges. An appeal may only claim that the judge made a serious
mistake of law, or that a decision by the judge was wrong for
legal reasons. One may not argue to the Supreme Court that the
judge or jury should have believed certain witnesses or reached
a different verdict. Usually, one may not argue anything having
to do with guilt or innocence.
When a defendant wins an appeal, all that is generally won is
the opportunity to have another trial. That is because all an
appeal claims is that the first trial was ruined because of a
mistake of law made by the judge. Therefore, if the defendant
wins, the state has the opportunity to conduct a second trial
at which that mistake will not happen. Defendants do not usually
go free simply by winning an appeal. If an appeal is lost, the
conviction and sentence become permanent.
An appeal takes a very long time to process. Before an appeal
can even be started, the entire transcript of your trial must
be typed by the stenographer present in court during the trial.
This can take several months. Then the lawyers on both sides will
work for a long time on written BRIEFS,
which are statements of all the arguments and can run up to 50
pages. When the briefs for both sides are written and given to
the court, there will be an ORAL
ARGUMENT on the case. This is when the lawyers for both
sides appear before all five judges of the Supreme Court to argue
the case orally. Clients, whether civil or criminal defendants
or plaintiffs, are not required to be present in the Supreme Court
for any proceedings and generally do not come. They are allowed
to be present if they desire. However, an imprisoned defendant
will not be brought into Court for an appeal. A few months after
oral argument, the court will issue its decision on the case,
sometimes with a written explanation of why it decided the way
it did. In all, the appeal may take one or two years to complete
from the time of conviction.
There is no such thing as an appeal from a guilty plea or from
a plea of nolo contendere in the Superior Court. A plea of guilty
or nolo contendere gives up the right to appeal, as well as the
right to trial. There are sometimes ways in which a guilty plea
may be undone, but that is very rare and requires a showing that
the defendant completely failed to understand what the guilty
plea was all about.
A defendant who is unhappy with the sentence received after a
guilty plea, after a trial, or after an unsuccessful appeal, may
move for a REDUCTION
OF SENTENCE. This motion must be heard by the same judge
who imposed the original sentence, within 120 days after the original
sentencing. If it is not brought in time, it is forfeited. If
the sentence was the result of a negotiated plea bargain -- and
even if it was not -- it is infrequent that the Court will reduce
it. Moreover, the law permits a judge to increase your sentence
if a motion to decrease it is filed.
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