Standards of review

People are often confused by the notion of an appellate court’s “standard of review” of the issues in the case brief. The standard of review is really the level of scrutiny applied by a reviewing court to the decisions of a lower court. The standard of review is a form of judicial restraint designed to preserve the authority of lower courts to make most of the important decisions during the conduct of hearings and trials, while reserving for the appellate court the ability to review the most important legal issues.

The traditional standards of appellate review can generally be described as:

Abuse of discretion

In the conduct of a trial and ruling on issues of of the admission of evidence, a trial court has broad discretion–the ability to exercise a large degree of individual judgment–in making legal rulings. For example, only relevant evidence is admissible, but even relevant evidence can be excluded if the probative value is “substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice.” This is a balancing test of relevancy that trial judges perform literally thousands of times a day in hearings and trials.

A trial court’s conclusion that evidence was relevant to the issues on trial, or that its relevance was substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice, is discretionary, and therefore reviewable by the appellate court only for abuse of that discretion. An abuse of discretion is “a clearly erroneous conclusion and judgment, one that is clearly against the logic and effect of the facts presented.” C.L.F. v. State, 1999 OK CR 12, ¶ 5, 989 P.2d 945, 946. As you can imagine, a reviewing court is rarely going to find a trial court erred under this standard.

De novo review

Under this standard of review, the trial court’s ruling is not afforded any particular degree of deference by the appellate court. For example in Seabolt v. State, 2006 OK CR 50, ¶ 5, 152 P.3d 235, the Court of Criminal Appeals said:

When reviewing a trial court’s ruling on a motion to suppress evidence based on an illegal search and seizure, we defer to the trial court’s factual findings about the stop and search unless those findings are clearly erroneous. The ultimate conclusion drawn from those facts is a legal question we review de novo.

In other words, the appellate court is going to apply the law to the facts found by the district court and reach an independent conclusion about the ultimate legal issue, without deference to the legal conclusion below. But notice how, since the review of the findings of fact of the trial is limited to “clearly erroneous,” a lot like the “abuse of discretion” standard, the findings of fact can ultimately play a determinative role in the application of the law.

Clearly erroneous/mixed question of fact and law

The federal courts generally use a law/fact distinction to determine the standard of review. If the issue is a pure question of law the federal courts of appeal conduct de novo review. If it involves the trial court’s decision on a question of fact, the decision is upheld unless “clearly erroneous.” See, e.g., United States v. Munoz-Tello, 531 F.3d 1174, 1181 (10th Cir. 2008), cert. denied, 129 S. Ct. 1314 (2009). “When evaluating the district court’s interpretation and application of the Sentencing Guidelines, we review legal questions de novo and factual findings for clear error, giving due deference to the district court’s application of the [G]uidelines to the facts.” Id.

These are the kinds of statements to look for when considering what “standard of review” is being applied by the appellate court to the rulings of the trial court. Hope this helps.!

An even more extensive discussion can be found here!