Opinion ID: 219956
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Under Padilla and Strickland, was Mr. Orocio's plea counsel ineffective?

Text: Mr. Orocio alleges that neither his prior counsel nor Mr. Portelli advised him that accepting the proposed guilty pleas would result in near-mandatory removal from the United States. We address a question left unanswered by the District Court: did this alleged failure to advise constitute ineffective assistance of counsel under the first prong of the Strickland test? Our analysis is rendered straightforward by Padilla. Padilla recognized that the failure of defense counsel to warn a defendant that a plea would make the defendant eligible for removal is a constitutional defect in representation that satisfies the first prong of the Strickland test. 130 S.Ct. at 1483. The facts of Padilla closely mirror those presented here, and we therefore hold that Mr. Orocio's affidavit sufficiently alleges that his counsel was constitutionally deficient. Jose Padilla was subject to removal for a controlled substance offense. His attorney affirmatively misled him, telling Padilla prior to Padilla's guilty plea that he did not have to worry about immigration status since he had been in the country so long. Id. at 1478. While Mr. Orocio does not allege that Mr. Portelli affirmatively misled him, Mr. Orocio does allege that Mr. Portelli wholly failed to advise him of the near-certain removal consequence of pleading guilty to a controlled substance offense. The Padilla Court expressly rejected any requirement that a defendant be affirmatively misled; for cases such as those in which the consequences can be divined simply from reading the text of the statute, the mere failure to warn of a removal consequence is constitutionally deficient representation because there is no relevant difference between an act of commission and an act of omission. Id. at 1483, 1484 (internal quotation marks omitted). We find unpersuasive the government's argument that, because Strickland measures counsel's performance on the facts of the particular case viewed as of the time of counsel's conduct, Mr. Orocio's claim should fail because it was not reasonable to expect his attorney, in 2004, to predict a Supreme Court decision nearly six years later. This argument misses the mark. [11] His attorney is not alleged to be deficient because he failed to predict the Padilla decisionhe is alleged to be deficient because he did not measure up to prevailing professional norms demanded of counsel at the plea stage as required by Strickland and its progeny. The Strickland decision did not hold that only existing Supreme Court decisions guide the reasonableness inquiry. Instead, it said: More specific guidelines are not appropriate. The Sixth Amendment refers simply to counsel, not specifying particular requirements of effective assistance. It relies instead on the legal profession's maintenance of standards sufficient to justify the law's presumption that counsel will fulfill the role in the adversary process that the Amendment envisions. The proper measure of attorney performance remains simply reasonableness under prevailing professional norms. 466 U.S. at 688, 104 S.Ct. 2052 (citation omitted). After reiterating that language from Strickland, the Padilla Court stated that [t]he weight of prevailing professional norms supports the view that counsel must advise her client regarding the risk of deportation. 130 S.Ct. at 1482 (citing sources from 1993, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2002, and 2004). These professional norms did not come into being on the date of the Padilla decision, but quite the opposite: the Padilla decision reflected the fact that these professional norms were well established long before the Padilla decision indeed, they were well established prior to the alleged deficiency of Mr. Orocio's attorney. [12] In any event, counsel had been required to adhere to professional norms in the decades since Strickland, and all of the sources of prevailing professional norms cited by the Court in Padilla pre-date Mr. Orocio's conviction and his attorney's failure to advise. It did not take the Padilla decision to establish what Mr. Portelli was required to do as a competent defense attorney. In light of the long-standing principle that counsel will be held to the prevailing legal standards of the profession, it is beyond cavil that Mr. Orocio's counsel was constitutionally deficient under the first prong of the Strickland inquiry if, as is alleged, he did not advise Mr. Orocio of the adverse immigration consequences of his guilty plea to a controlled substance offense in accordance with the then-prevailing professional norms.