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In my last post about sexual assault myths, I referenced a case involving three sexual assault convictions overturned by the Pennsylvania Superior Court. (The case is formally Commonwealth v. Claybrook; here’s the Philadelphia Inquirer’s write-up.) The jury convicted and the trial judge denied the defendant’s motion for a new trial, but the Superior Court reversed, holding that the convictions were “contrary to the weight of the evidence,” and so remanded the case for a new trial. The prosecution appealed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which is now considering the case.

This sort of issue is a bit distant from my normal work on civil litigation, but it implicates a fundamental principle of how our courts are supposed to function, hence my interest. In general, appellate courts exist to review legal issues, not factual issues. They don’t hear any testimony. They don’t see any witnesses shift and pivot in their seat, fumble with their words, look to their lawyer for help, or observe any other non-verbal cues that we associate with a person lying, being confused, or telling the truth. They read a cold transcribed record, where “I shot the clerk” may mean something else entirely.

As a civil lawyer, I find it strange to see an appellate court ever overrule a jury’s factual findings where those factual findings were also sustained by the trial judge. In civil trials, unless the trial judge made a legal error — like allowing in prejudicial evidence, excluding probative evidence, or giving a flawed jury instruction — then the verdict will almost always stand on appeal. The closest we have in civil litigation to “weight of the evidence” is “judgment notwithstanding the verdict,” which ends the case in favor of the party that lost in front of the jury, but that’s essentially reserved for the trial court to decide, not the appellate court, and the standard is astonishingly strict:

In reviewing the propriety of an order granting or denying judgment notwithstanding the verdict, we must determine whether there was sufficient competent evidence to sustain the verdict. We view the evidence in the light most favorable to the verdict winner and give him or her the benefit of every reasonable inference arising therefrom while rejecting all unfavorable testimony and inferences. Moreover, a judgment n.o.v. should only be entered in a clear case and any doubts must be resolved in favor of the verdict winner. Finally, a judge’s appraisement of evidence is not to be based on how he would have voted had he been a member of the jury. A court may not vacate a jury’s finding unless the evidence was such that no two reasonable minds could disagree that the outcome should have been rendered in favor of the movant.

Birth Center v. St. Paul Companies, Inc., 787 A. 2d 376 (Pa. 2001)(quotations and citations omitted). In the Birth Center case, I hasten to add, the trial court granted judgment n.o.v., overturning the jury’s verdict, but the Pennsylvania Supreme Court re-instated the jury’s verdict. It’s the jury’s province, not the court’s, to decide the facts. Like I said, outside of reversals for purely legal issues, judgment n.o.v. is exceedingly rare.

In criminal trials, however, there’s the “weight of the evidence” challenge, which I can only describe as a request for a do-over. In contrast to a motion for judgment n.o.v. in the civil context, a defendant’s motion for a new trial on the weight of the evidence allows the trial court to independently review the facts decided by the jury, with a far less strict standard than “no two reasonable minds could disagree:”

A motion for new trial on the grounds that the verdict is contrary to the weight of the evidence, concedes that there is sufficient evidence to sustain the verdict. Thus, the trial court is under no obligation to view the evidence in the light most favorable to the verdict winner. An allegation that the verdict is against the weight of the evidence is addressed to the discretion of the trial court. A new trial should not be granted because of a mere conflict in the testimony or because the judge on the same facts would have arrived at a different conclusion. A trial judge must do more than reassess the credibility of the witnesses and allege that he would not have assented to the verdict if he were a juror. Trial judges, in reviewing a claim that the verdict is against the weight of the evidence do not sit as the thirteenth juror. Rather, the role of the trial judge is to determine that notwithstanding all the facts, certain facts are so clearly of greater weight that to ignore them or to give them equal weight with all the facts is to deny justice.

Commonwealth v. Widmer, 744 A. 2d 745 (Pa. 2000)(quotations and citations omitted).

Justice demands we have a check on the jury system like that. Justice is blind, but juries sometimes are not — sometimes they’re genuinely confused, given the complicated way in which trials are run — and the trial judge stands as a bulwark against manifest injustices. The “weight of the evidence” challenge was perhaps most famously granted by Judge James Edwin Horton in the Scottsboro Boys re-trial, where he overturned the jury’s conviction of the young men for rape. (Judge Horton knew the ruling would cost him his re-election, and it did.) 
Continue Reading How Does An Appellate Court Find A Conviction Contrary To The Weight Of The Evidence?