Opinion ID: 219956
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Supreme Court decides Padilla

Text: Soon after the District Court denied Mr. Orocio's coram nobis petition and this appeal was docketed, the Supreme Court decided Padilla v. Kentucky , a case that goes to the heart of Mr. Orocio's claim. The Padilla decision clarified the Strickland standard for ineffective assistance of counsel in the context of the immigration consequences of plea agreements. The Padilla Court ruled that counsel, in order to be constitutionally competent, has an obligation to advise criminal defendants whether an offense to which they may plead guilty will result in removal from the United States. 130 S.Ct. at 1478. To do so, the Court first had to determine whether Strickland applied at all to advice concerning the immigration consequences of a plea. Eschewing the view of a number of state and federal courts that immigration consequences were collateral and thereby beyond the scope of the representation required by the Sixth Amendment, the Court held that because deportation is a particularly severe `penalty,'... advice regarding deportation is not categorically removed from the ambit of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Id. at 1481-82. Thus, the Court highlighted the need to apply Strickland 's two-prong test for ineffective assistance of counsel in Jose Padilla's case: (1) the performance prongi.e., whether counsel's representation `fell below an objective standard of reasonableness'; and (2) the prejudice prongi.e., whether `there is a reasonable probability that, but for counsel's unprofessional errors, the result of the proceeding would have been different.' Id. at 1482 (quoting Strickland, 466 U.S. at 688, 694, 104 S.Ct. 2052). In addressing the first Strickland prong, the Court concluded that Jose Padilla ha[d] sufficiently alleged constitutional deficiency in his attorney's failure to advise him of a plea's immigration consequences. Id. at 1483. The Court noted that the terms of the relevant immigration statute are succinct, clear, and explicit in defining the removal consequence for Padilla's conviction, which was a controlled substance offense rendering him removable pursuant to 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(2)(B)(i). Id. The Court went on to observe that: Padilla's counsel could have easily determined that his plea would make him eligible for [removal] simply from reading the text of the statute, which addresses not some broad classification of crimes but specifically commands removal for all controlled substances convictions except for the most trivial of marijuana possession offenses. Instead, Padilla's counsel provided him false assurance that his conviction would not result in his removal from this country. 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 [removal] was presumptively mandatory, and his counsel's advice was incorrect. Id. [5] The Court then rejected the suggestion of the Solicitor General, as amicus curiae, to limit Strickland in the context of Padilla's claim only to the extent he alleged affirmative misadvice about immigration consequences, as opposed to the mere failure to provide any advice at all. Id. at 1484-86. In declining to follow the Solicitor General's recommendation, the Court said [i]t is quintessentially the duty of counsel to provide her client with available advice about an issue like [removal] and the failure to do so clearly satisfies the first prong of the Strickland analysis. Id. at 1484 (internal quotation marks omitted). The Padilla Court expressly refrained from determining whether Jose Padilla had met the second Strickland prong and demonstrated that he had been prejudiced. That issue was remitted to the Kentucky courts to consider in the first instance. Padilla, 130 S.Ct. at 1483-84.