appeals

11.07 Brady Claims in Texas: what did they know, and when did they know it

August 6, 2021 | By Pullan & Young

For those not familiar with the Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland, it holds that a prosecutor has an affirmative duty to disclose material evidence favorable to the defense. It’s a simple enough directive, but the details of what comprises exculpatory evidence and whether the prosecutor has control of the evidence gets complicated.

And that’s just from the pretrial perspective.

If you’ve been convicted and are trying to argue that the prosecutor failed to disclose exculpatory evidence after the fact, you will run into surprising limitations on what you can argue.

The Texas Guilty Plea, Part 1: Admonishments and the Plea Colloquy

January 12, 2020 | By Pullan & Young

Defendants usually don’t realize their guilty plea was involuntary at the time they enter it. This is because involuntary pleas are almost always based on a misunderstanding, misrepresentation, or ineffective assistance on the part of plea counsel. It takes awhile for the defendant to realize what has happened.

Trying to undo a guilty plea is never easy. Defendants often fail to understand the legal significance of what they’ve signed. If you’re regretting entering a guilty plea and want to fight it, ring up a good criminal appeal attorney, because, as you’ll see below, the strategy you need to fight it depends on the procedural details of the case and at what point in the process you realized you’d been crossed, mislead, or misadvised.

In a three-part series, I’m going to describe how the guilty plea is protected by the Criminal Justice System, how a plea bargain is immortalized into a judgment, how a plea open to the court works (and how defendants sometimes get screwed with this procedural arrangement), and how to challenge guilty pleas as involuntary.

Texas Criminal Appeals: strategic thinking on error preservation

November 8, 2019 | By Pullan & Young

One of the first questions clients ask me about appealing their criminal conviction is what issues can be raised.

My usual answer: it depends on what your trial attorney objected to. The points of error I raise are almost always limited by what the defense attorney did or didn’t do during trial. Below is a description of why objections matter, how they are made, and how a good appellate attorney can act strategically when dealing with poorly-made objections.

Why Objections Matter

The Motion for New Trial in Texas Criminal Cases

October 19, 2019 | By Pullan & Young

In Texas, the statute-based motion for new trial is the most efficient way to raise two types of error immediately after a conviction or guilty plea:

Ineffective Assistance of Counsel and
Newly-Discovered Evidence Favorable to the Defense

Should your Texas marijuana case have been dismissed?

July 13, 2019 | By Pullan & Young

As many of you know, the Texas Legislature recently passed a law legalizing hemp. You may not be aware that the new hemp law has led to the dismissal of hundreds of weed cases, and that your recent conviction may be legally suspect.

If you have been convicted of or entered a plea to a possession of marijuana case since June 10, 2019, you may have a legal basis to get your conviction or disposition overturned. You should consult a post-conviction attorney for more information.

The New Law

After conviction, what can you appeal?

September 6, 2018 | By Pullan & Young

It seems like a simple question. Most of my clients believe that when you appeal a conviction you get to let the appellate court know all the mistakes that were made during trial. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

There are two factors that limit the complaints (or points of error) that you can raise on appeal.

The first limiting factor is the concept of preservation. Although there are some exceptions, for the most part you only get raise issues on appeal that were preserved during the trial. The usual steps to preservation are: 1) make an objection; 2) make sure the trial court rules on your objection; and 3) if you are trying to admit something into evidence, make sure you make a record of what you would have admitted if allowed. If these steps are not taken, the appellate court will not be able to review your complaint, even if it was an otherwise valid legal issue.