Opinion ID: 2815874
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Whether Chaidez controls Kwan

Text: We next turn to the government’s argument that Kwan is controlled by Chaidez. The government contends that for the same reasons Chaidez concluded Padilla announced a new rule and was not retroactive, Kwan must also have announced a new rule and not be retroactive. Because we find Kwan sufficiently distinguishable from Padilla, we conclude Kwan is not controlled by Chaidez. In Chaidez, the Supreme Court held that Padilla did not have retroactive effect. 133 S. Ct. at 1105. In evaluating Padilla under the Teague framework, the Court explained that Padilla had not simply applied the “general standard” for IAC in Strickland, but rather “did something more.” Chaidez, 133 S. Ct. at 1107, 1108. That “something more” was answering a threshold question: whether Sixth Amendment protections governing the competence of defense counsel extended to advice regarding deportation. Id. In concluding that they did, the Court answered in part a question left explicitly open in Hill v. Lockhart, 474 U.S. 52 (1985), whether the Sixth Amendment covered so-called “collateral consequence[s]” of a conviction. Chaidez, 133 S. Ct. at 1108 UNITED STATES V. CHAN 9 (citing Hill, 474 U.S. at 60). Importantly, as we noted above, the Court answered this question in Padilla by rejecting the direct/collateral consequence distinction, declining to label deportation as either and, instead, identifying it as “unique.” Id. at 1110 (quoting Padilla, 130 U.S. at 365) (internal quotation marks omitted). As such, Padilla fundamentally altered Sixth Amendment jurisprudence in at least partially breaking down the distinction between direct and collateral consequences. Id. at 1110–11. Kwan’s much narrower holding instead focused on whether counsel’s performance was deficient. See 407 F.3d at 1015–17. Kwan did not assert Padilla’s holding that attorneys could be liable for failing to advise about adverse immigration consequences; rather, Kwan merely held that attorneys’ affirmative misrepresentations—or incorrect answers to direct questions from clients—regardless of their subject matter would be deficient performance under Strickland. Id. Thus, Kwan’s analysis rested on the distinction between failure to advise and affirmative misadvice, not on the direct/collateral/unique nature of the consequence faced by the petitioner. While there is some language in Chaidez that appears to cover both failure to advise and affirmative misrepresentations, see 133 S. Ct at 1110 (“Padilla . . . made the Strickland test operative . . . when a criminal lawyer gives (or fails to give) advice about immigration consequences.”), Chaidez also recognized that prior to Padilla, certain circuits “recognized a separate rule for material misrepresentations,” which “lived in harmony with” other precedent excluding claims based on failure to advise, id. at 1112. Because Chaidez focused on the novelty of Padilla’s threshold inquiry as to whether the Sixth Amendment ever 10 UNITED STATES V. CHAN applies to advice regarding deportation advice—an analysis absent from Kwan—we conclude that Kwan is not controlled by Chaidez and thus proceed with our own analysis of Kwan under Teague.