Legal Commentary

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

By Jeralyn

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.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on March 31, 2010 (boomark / email).