Opinion ID: 704006
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Cuyler and Related Supreme Court Cases

Text: 43 Although the federal circuit courts have unblinkingly applied Cuyler 's actual conflict and adverse effect standards to all kinds of alleged attorney ethical conflicts, 10 a careful reading of the Supreme Court cases belies this expansiveness. Neither Cuyler nor its progeny strayed beyond the ethical problems of multiple representation. One cannot read Cuyler to analyze conflicts of interest in a context broader than that of multiple client representation. The case came to the Supreme Court raising two issues left open by a previous multiple representation case: whether a trial judge must sua sponte inquire into the propriety of multiple representation, and whether the mere possibility of a conflict of interest warrants the conclusion that the defendant was deprived of his right to counsel. Cuyler, 446 U.S. at 343, 100 S.Ct. at 1716. In stating its Sixth Amendment standard that has been quoted above, the Court said: 44 Glasser established that unconstitutional multiple representation is never harmless error. Once the Court concluded that Glasser's lawyer had an actual conflict of interest, it refused to indulge in nice calculations as to the amount of prejudice attributable to the conflict. The conflict itself demonstrated a denial of the right to have the effective assistance of counsel. Thus, a defendant who shows that a conflict of interest actually affected the adequacy of his representation need not demonstrate prejudice in order to obtain relief. But until a defendant shows that his counsel actively represented conflicting interests, he has not established the constitutional predicate for his claim of ineffective assistance. 45 Cuyler, 446 U.S. at 349-50, 100 S.Ct. at 1719 (citations and footnote omitted). While some sentences in this paragraph do not refer explicitly to multiple representation, they must be read in the context of the first and last sentences of the paragraph, which do. In particular, the last sentence, which actually states the standard, requires that counsel have actively represented  conflicting interests, not that he have actively been in a conflict situation. Further, the two cases cited as authority in this section, Glasser v. United States, 315 U.S. 60, 62 S.Ct. 457, 86 L.Ed. 680 (1942), and Holloway v. Arkansas, 435 U.S. 475, 98 S.Ct. 1173, 55 L.Ed.2d 426 (1978), were multiple representation cases, and the footnote at the end of the paragraph cites a law review article about multiple representation: Comment, Conflict of Interests in Multiple Representation of Criminal Co-Defendants, 68 J.Crim.L. & Criminology 226, 231-32 (1977). 46 Justice Marshall's separate opinion in Cuyler, written to challenge the adverse effect prong of the test, endeavors to define conflict of interests. 446 U.S. at 355 n. 3, 100 S.Ct. at 1722 n. 3 (Marshall, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). In each of the ethics codes to which he refers, Justice Marshall cites only the canon or rule dealing with multiple client representation. 47 Four later Supreme Court cases have clarified the scope of Cuyler. In the first, Wood v. Georgia, 450 U.S. 261, 101 S.Ct. 1097, 67 L.Ed.2d 220 (1981), three employees of an adult movie theater were prosecuted for distributing obscenity. The theater paid for their representation and also agreed to pay their fines. When the theater broke its promise and did not pay, the employees' probation was revoked and the employees were incarcerated. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to examine whether a state could imprison a probationer for not paying a fine, but after viewing the record, the Court remanded the case for consideration of a possible conflict of interest. 11 Id. at 273-74, 101 S.Ct. at 1104. 48 In Wood, the Court was troubled by the lawyer's apparent decision to undertake a strategy that benefitted the theater at the expense of the employees. The opinion noted that their [the employees'] counsel has acted as the agent of the employer, id. at 267, 101 S.Ct. at 1101; charged that the employer and petitioners' attorney were seeking to create a test case, id.; and concluded its conflict discussion by noting that if petitioners' counsel was serving the employer's interest in setting a precedent, this conflict in goals may well have influenced the decision of the trial court.... Id. at 268, 101 S.Ct. at 1102. While the opinion does not say whether the lawyer formally represented the theater or not, the lawyer was at least in the functional equivalent of a joint representation. [P]etitioners were represented by their employer's lawyer, who may not have pursued their interests single-mindedly. Id. at 271-72, 101 S.Ct. at 1103. Both the theater and the employees expected him to advance their interests, yet to serve one might require him to fail the others, while doing nothing could harm both. 49 The second case, Nix v. Whiteside, 475 U.S. 157, 106 S.Ct. 988, 89 L.Ed.2d 123 (1986) placed an outer bound on Cuyler. Whiteside's counsel conditioned his representation on Whiteside's not committing perjury. Id. at 161, 106 S.Ct. at 991. The Court held that a conflict between a lawyer's ethical obligation not to aid perjury and a client's desire to commit perjury is not remotely the kind of conflict of interests dealt with in Cuyler v. Sullivan. Id. at 176, 106 S.Ct. at 999. It noted that [i]f a 'conflict' between a client's proposal and counsel's ethical obligation gives rise to a presumption that counsel's assistance was prejudicially ineffective, every guilty criminal's conviction would be suspect if the defendant had sought to obtain an acquittal by illegal means. Id. 50 The third case, Strickland v. Washington, supra, addressed Cuyler while defining how much prejudice a defendant must show in the usual ineffectiveness case. The Court stated that Cuyler is not quite a per se rule of prejudice, and that [p]rejudice is presumed only if the defendant demonstrates that counsel 'actively represented conflicting interests' and that 'an actual conflict of interest adversely affected his lawyer's performance.'  466 U.S. at 692, 104 S.Ct. at 2067 (quoting Cuyler, 446 U.S. at 350, 348, 100 S.Ct. at 1719, 1718). The language Strickland excerpted from Cuyler comes directly from the passage reproduced earlier, in which the Court discussed a lawyer who actively represented multiple parties. 51 Contrary to Beets's argument, Strickland did not say that prejudice is presumed whenever counsel breaches the duty of loyalty. See Beets, 986 F.2d at 1493 (Higginbotham, J., concurring). Strickland mentioned the duty of loyalty to underscore the general significance of conflicts of interest. 466 U.S. at 692, 104 S.Ct. at 2067. To define when that problem becomes serious enough to attain constitutional import, or, put differently, when it triggers the not quite per se rule of prejudice, the Court quoted a section of Cuyler discussing multiple representations. Id. 52 The last case in this series is Burger v. Kemp, 483 U.S. 776, 107 S.Ct. 3114, 97 L.Ed.2d 638 (1987), in which the Court applied the Cuyler analysis to determine whether a habeas corpus petitioner's case had been adversely affected by an actual conflict arising out of his attorney's having participated with a law partner in the defense of a co-defendant. Both men had been charged with capital murder, and each defendant contended that he had less responsibility and was less culpable than his co-defendant. Nevertheless, the Court found no actual conflict and no adverse effect of the assumed multiple representation on Burger's defense. Burger reinforces the notion that not every potential conflict, even in multiple representation cases, is an actual one for Sixth Amendment purposes. 53 In sum, the Supreme Court has not expanded Cuyler to reach the ethical violations alleged in Beets's case. Cuyler, a multiple representation case, restated a rule developed in multiple representation cases. Nix declined to extend that rule to all conflicts between client and lawyer. Wood simply recognized that some third-party fee arrangements can develop into the functional equivalent of multiple representation. Strickland cited Cuyler's language dealing with the impact of multiple representation. Several Justices have acknowledged this apparent limitation of Cuyler. See Illinois v. Washington, 469 U.S. 1181, 105 S.Ct. 941, 83 L.Ed.2d 953 (1984) (White, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari). 12 To this day, however, the uncertainty remains. 13 The dissent shares this uncertainty, arguing on one hand that Cuyler is not limited to multiple or serial representation cases but acknowledging that it should not apply to most breaches of legal ethics. 54