23 The effects of a criminal conviction in Costa Rica are of three kinds: the first is legal; the second professional and the third personal. The legal effect of a conviction is the judgment. However, in Costa Rica a conviction also means that one’s name will be listed in the Judiciary’s Record of Convicted Felons and one loses any chance of being granted such benefits as a stay of execution of sentence. The civil effects would be payment of any fines and fees ordered, and possible attachments or garnishments or property losses. Conviction of a crime has serious personal and professional consequences as well, which has a deterrent and intimidating effect on someone in the media business. The right to appeal the conviction to a higher court, recognized in Article 8 of the American Convention, means that the accused has the right to have the ruling, in all its parts, reviewed on the facts, on the law and, most especially, on the sentence. Due process is an integral part of this right. In the Costa Rican system, however, a convicted person has only one remedy to challenge a conviction, which is the extraordinary remedy of cassation. A writ of cassation is not a full appeal and is not an appeal in the meaning of Article 8 of the American Convention. A writ filed with a court of cassation will not set the stage for a complete review of a judgment, both on the facts and the law. The review done by the Court of Criminal Cassation is very narrow in scope and confined exclusively to matters of law. The court of cassation will not deal with three fundamental aspects: it will not re-assess the evidence; it will not review the facts; and it will not venture beyond the claims of the parties exercising this remedy. Although some progress has been made in Costa Rica toward ridding the cassation procedure of some of its formalities, it continues to be a very formalistic remedy that is very narrow in scope. Costa Rica has to broaden the scope of this remedy, rid it of some of the formalities that accompany it, enable it to serve more purposes so that it becomes a remedy by means of which justice can be served in a particular case, without sacrificing oral arguments. In 1990, with Order 528 of the Constitutional Chamber of the Costa Rican Supreme Court, initial steps were taken to eliminate some of the procedural formalities associated with the writ of cassation, in response to recommendations made by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which asked Costa Rica to amend its laws. The Constitutional Court ordered that the remedy be “de-formalized”. But more progress is needed. In the instant case, the review done by the Third Chamber of the Costa Rican Supreme Court was the kind of narrow review typical of cassation. That Chamber could not examine the facts and had to accept them as established by the sentencing court. The right to a hearing by an impartial court or judge, recognized in Article 8(1) of the American Convention, presupposes that the court that reviewed a verdict of acquittal and nullified it cannot then review a verdict of conviction in the same case. In cases it has already reviewed and decided the Costa Rican Court of Cassation has been careful to avoid violating the principle of impartiality and to that end keeps a list of alternate justices to hear cases that come up for review a second time. In the case of Mr. Mauricio Herrera Ulloa, however, the Third Chamber of the Costa Rican Supreme Court did not