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Supreme Court: Overturns Gulty Plea for Failing to Warn of Deportation Consequences

The Supreme Court took a big step forward today and ruled that defense counsel must advise clients of adverse immigration consequences to their guilty pleas. The case is Padilla v. Kentucky, the opinion is here. Even Roberts and Alito concurred (Scalia and Thomas dissented.) The holding:

The lawyer for an alien charged with crime has a constitutional obligation to tell the client that a guilty plea carries a risk that he will be deported. The Court, however, does not decide whether the individual in this specific case has been prejudiced by the lawyer’s failure to give that advice.

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From the syllabus:

The weight of prevailing professional norms supports the view that counsel must advise her client regarding the deportation risk. And this Court has recognized the importance to the client of “ ‘[p]reserving the . . . right to remain in the United States’ ”and “preserving the possibility of” discretionary relief from deportation. INS v. St. Cyr, 533 U. S. 289, 323.

Thus, this is not a hard case in which to find deficiency: The consequences of Padilla’s plea could easily be determined from reading the removal statute, his deportation was presumptively mandatory, and his counsel’s advice was incorrect.

There will, however, undoubtedly be numerous situations in which the deportation consequences of a plea are unclear. In those cases, a criminal defense attorney need do no more than advise a noncitizen client that pending criminal charges may carry adverse immigration consequences. But when the deportation consequence is truly clear, as it was here, the duty to give correct advice is equally clear. Accepting Padilla’s allegations as true, he has sufficiently alleged constitutional deficiency to satisfy Strickland’s first prong. Whether he can satisfy the second prong, prejudice, is left for the Kentucky courts to consider in the first instance.

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  • Display: Sort:
    Technically . . . (none / 0) (#1)
    by JDB on Wed Mar 31, 2010 at 12:07:51 PM EST
    SCOTUS did not overturn the guilty plea.  As the end of the syllabus point you quote mentions, whether Padilla succeeds on the second prong of Strickland and gets any relief will be a question for the Kentucky courts (initially, at least).

    Nonetheless, a good decision.

    You know what I love about rulings like this? (none / 0) (#2)
    by Kimberley on Wed Mar 31, 2010 at 12:28:29 PM EST
    They demonstrate the near gravitational pull of the Constitution.

    As ideas go, to exert a kind of planetary force...

    Every now and again, a case like this will give us a snapshot of something in its orbit and it's awe-inspiring to me to see an idea speak to a single human being and recognize an injustice done them.

    Justice? (none / 0) (#3)
    by diogenes on Wed Mar 31, 2010 at 08:29:53 PM EST
    All you defense lawyers please tell me how many of your clients with high-level charges like Padilla's actually take a plea bargain because they are INNOCENT but fear conviction as opposed to bargaining down the sentence because they know they did the crime?  Are you all advising innocent people to plead guilty?  How often does this happen in one hundred plea bargains?