APPELLATE BRIEF

Appellate brief

Table of Contents

Introduction3

THE NATURE OF APPEALS AND THE APPELLATE PROCESS5

APPELLATE COURT ORGANIZATION8

THE FBI AND ATF10

The Crime Control Function11

Important Influences on Officers' Behavior14

Police Bureaucracy15

COMPOSITION OF APPEALS17

HANDLING APPEALS19

THE CHANGING VIEW OF APPEALS21

References22

Appellate Brief

Introduction

When people think of court cases, almost everyone focuses on trial courts, where a judge presides over the hurly-burly interactions among a defendant, jurors, witnesses, a possible victim, a prosecutor, and a criminal defense attorney. This image has been fostered by popular culture, including books, magazines, and television programs. Because the overwhelming number of cases filed with courts each year is handled by trial courts, there is support for this outlook. In 1999, for example, there were 1.99 million serious (felony) criminal cases filed in state trial courts in the United States, and only 292,000 civil and criminal cases combined filed with state appellate courts (Ostrom and Kauder 2001). But despite their relatively small number, the cases filed in appellate courts are of profound significance. (Theoharis, 2002)

The appellate process is the only institutional mechanism to hold trial courts accountable for the correctness of their decisions. Once a trial court has rendered a final judgment and sentenced an offender, the validity of the verdict and the sentence can be challenged. Those challenges are called appeals, and the manner of resolving those cases is called the appellate process. Understanding them casts light on how well trial courts are performing their jobs. It also provides a more complete picture of the legal process than a focus on trial courts alone.

THE U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is a cabinet department in the United States government that enforces the law and defends the interests of the United States according to the law, ensuring fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans. The Department of Justice is administered by the U.S. attorney general, one of the original members of the president's cabinet.

The office of attorney general is older than the Department of Justice which the attorneys general have headed since 1870. The Judiciary Act of 1789 created the office of attorney general, providing for the appointment of “a meet person, learned in the law, to act as Attorney-General for the United States.” The act stipulated that the duties of the attorney general were to prosecute and conduct all suits in the Supreme Court concerning the United States, and to give his advice and opinion upon questions of law when the president of the United States required it or when the heads of any of the departments required it.

The 1789 act did not make the attorney general a member of the presidential cabinet, but President George Washington decided that he needed the first attorney general of the United States, Edmund Randolph, to attend all of the cabinet meetings because of the numerous legal matters that he and his cabinet discussed. Since the attorney general continued to attend the cabinet meetings in the administrations of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and beyond, the office became recognized as a cabinet ...