An error is harmless where it did not affect substantial rights or influence the verdict. The burden of demonstrating prejudice generally rests on the appellant in civil cases.
Structural errors are not subject to harmless error analysis.
Alternative Names:
Harmless Error Doctrine, Non-Prejudicial Error
Why it Matters?
Harmless error is what defeats most preserved evidentiary challenges on appeal, since establishing that a ruling was wrong is only half the work and demonstrating that it changed the outcome is substantially harder. The strongest showings identify how the excluded or admitted evidence connected to a contested element the jury had to resolve. Cumulative error arguments aggregate individually harmless rulings and occasionally succeed where no single error would.
Frequently Confused with
Related terms
Frequently asked questions
Why does harmless error defeat most evidentiary appeals?
What is cumulative error?
