Opinion ID: 1784700
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: strickland and the certified question

Text: In Strickland, the Supreme Court created a two-pronged test for determining whether defense counsel provided constitutionally deficient assistance to a defendant. 466 U.S. 687, 104 S.Ct. 2052. First, the defendant must establish specific acts or omissions of counsel that were so serious that counsel was not functioning as the `counsel' guaranteed the defendant by the Sixth Amendment. Id. Second, the defendant must demonstrate prejudice that is, the defendant must demonstrate that there is a reasonable probability that, but for counsel's unprofessional errors, the result of the proceeding would have been different. Id. at 694, 104 S.Ct. 2052. The benchmark for judging any claim of ineffectiveness must be whether counsel's conduct so undermined the proper functioning of the adversarial process that the trial cannot be relied on as having produced a just result. Id. at 686, 104 S.Ct. 2052. Subsequently, in Hill v. Lockhart, 474 U.S. 52, 58, 106 S.Ct. 366, 88 L.Ed.2d 203 (1985), the Court applied the Strickland test to claims of ineffective assistance in pleading guilty to a crime. The Court modified the prejudice requirement, stating that in plea cases the issue is whether counsel's constitutionally ineffective performance affected the outcome of the plea process. In other words, in order to satisfy the `prejudice' requirement, the defendant must show that there is a reasonable probability that, but for counsel's errors, he would not have pleaded guilty and would have insisted on going to trial. Id. at 59, 106 S.Ct. 366. In his postconviction motion, Dickey alleged that his counsel in 1996 was constitutionally ineffective because he erroneously advised Dickey that the conviction resulting from his plea could not be used to enhance the sentence for any future crime. The conviction, however, was used to enhance his Alabama sentence on a crime he later committed. Dickey declared that his 1996 plea was thus involuntary because he would not have pled guilty had he been correctly apprised about this issue. When such allegations are not conclusively rebutted by the record, we must accept them as true. See Freeman v. State, 761 So.2d 1055, 1061 (Fla.2000). As noted above, we have previously held that counsel has no duty to advise a defendant of the potential sentence-enhancing effects a conviction may have on the sentence for a crime committed in the future. Major, 814 So.2d at 431. We reasoned that defendants are not entitled to advice about the collateral consequences of their pleas in a pending case. In this case, Dickey has alleged that counsel erroneously advised him regarding a collateral effect. Thus, we are squarely confronted with this question: whether a defendant's claim that counsel affirmatively misadvised him that his conviction could not be used to enhance the sentence for a future crime and that absent this erroneous advice he would not have pled guilty or nolo contendere but would have gone to trial facially meets the requirements of Strickland. [4] Although we did not decide this question in Bates, 887 So.2d at 1215, several members of the Court addressed it in concurring opinions, analyzing the claim under Strickland. In an opinion in which Justice Lewis concurred, Justice Wells concluded that, assuming the misadvice regarding the enhancement potential of a conviction on a sentence for a future crime was deemed deficient performance under Strickland, the claim failed the second prong of the ineffective assistance test. Id. at 1220 (Wells, J., concurring specially). He reasoned the cause of prejudice to [the defendant] is the separate and independent new crime for which he was convicted after the plea was entered. Id. The defendant thus could not plead and prove prejudice. Id. In a separate concurring opinion, Justice Cantero also concluded that such allegations are not cognizable as claims of ineffective assistance of counsel. Id. at 1221 (Cantero, J., specially concurring). Justice Cantero reasoned that [a]ny wrong advice about a current conviction's potential effect on the conviction or sentence for a future crime is irrelevant to the plea and sentence on which counsel is advising and cannot constitute ineffective assistance of counsel in the case at issue. Id. These differing opinions are encompassed in our decision here. Having fully considered the issue, we answer the certified question in the negative. We conclude that allegations of affirmative misadvice by trial counsel on the sentence-enhancing consequences of a defendant's plea for future criminal behavior in an otherwise facially sufficient motion are not cognizable as an ineffective assistance of counsel claim. A majority of this Court concludes that claims that a defendant entered a plea based on wrong advice about a potential sentence enhancement for a future crime fail to meet the Strickland test, either because such claims do not demonstrate deficient performance in the case at issue or because, as a matter of law, any deficient performance could not have prejudiced the defendant in that case. Therefore, we hold that wrong advice about the consequences for a crime not yet committed cannot constitute ineffective assistance of counsel.