Opinion ID: 853369
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Post-Hill Decisions

Text: Hill himself ultimately prevailed in the Eighth Circuit on his claim that bad advice as to parole eligibility caused him to plead when he would not have done so if properly advised. After losing in the Supreme Court, Hill filed a second petition that cured the pleading defect identified in Hill by alleging that his guilty plea was caused by the bad advice. Ultimately, the Eighth Circuit affirmed the grant of habeas corpus. Hill v. Lockhart, 877 F.2d 698 (8th Cir.1989). In the Eighth Circuit's view: To succeed under Strickland, Hill need not show prejudice in the sense that he probably would have been acquitted or given a shorter sentence at trial, but for his attorney's error. All we must find here is a reasonable probability that the result of the plea process would have been differentthat Hill would not have pleaded guilty and would have insisted on going to trial. Id. at 704 (quoting Hill, 474 U.S. at 59, 106 S.Ct. 366). This was affirmed en banc by a five-to-four decision. Hill v. Lockhart, 894 F.2d 1009 (8th Cir.1990). The Eighth Circuit later explained its holding in Hill in Hale v. Lockhart, 903 F.2d 545, 549 (8th Cir.1990): The holding in Hill, however, was narrow, and rested primarily on the district court's finding that petitioner pleaded guilty as a direct consequence of his counsel's erroneous advice and that, but for this advice, the outcome of the plea process would have been different. Similarly, the Eleventh Circuit has held that prejudice is shown when a guilty plea is induced by a failure to advise that a guilty plea in state court would not preclude federal authorities from imposing sanctions for parole violations based on the same conduct. Finch v. Vaughn, 67 F.3d 909, 916-17 (11th Cir.1995). Some courts have found no deficient performance in the failure to advise as to sentencing or penal consequences. United States v. Gordon, 4 F.3d 1567, 1570-71 (10th Cir.1993); Ford v. Lockhart, 904 F.2d 458, 462-63 (8th Cir.1990). Faced with this uncertainty as to what needs to be alleged and how it may be proven, a number of other courts have rejected claims of prejudice after a guilty plea, holding it is insufficient for the petitioner, without more specific facts, merely to allege in postconviction proceedings that he would not have pleaded if he had been properly represented. Others reject claims that a plea would not have been entered when the record of the plea proceeding establishes that the sentencing parameters were known and the factual basis for the plea was established. United States v. Standiford, 148 F.3d 864, 869 (7th Cir.1998); Arango-Alvarez v. United States, 134 F.3d 888, 892-93 (7th Cir.1998); Jones v. Page, 76 F.3d 831, 844-45 (7th Cir.1996). Some have formulated the test as whether a correct understanding of the law would have affected counsel's recommendation to plead. [7] All of these approaches, though phrased differently from the way we expressed it in Van Cleave, lead to the same ultimate conclusion as to the required showing of prejudice. If a change in counsel's recommendation is the test, because a plea agreement is virtually assured to produce no worse penal consequences than a conviction after trial, a change in counsel's recommendation would necessarily turn on an evaluation of whether an adequate legal performance would produce a reasonable chance of a better result from a trial. This formulation thus amounts to the same conclusion announced in Van Cleave : a showing of prejudice to upset a guilty plea requires a showing of a reasonable probability of a result of not guilty. Similarly, these cases in one way or another suggest that to show prejudice the petitioner's allegation must controvert the record that he was told of the maximum penal consequence.