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

Heading: Retroactivity of Padilla

Text: Because Padilla was decided after Mr. Orocio's conviction became final, we must consider whether retroactivity principles bar the application of Padilla 's holding to this case.
In Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288, 109 S.Ct. 1060, 103 L.Ed.2d 334 (1989), the Supreme Court set forth two regimes governing the retroactive application of constitutional principles to criminal cases. Teague divided the world into two categories, old rules and new rules. A rule is a new rule for Teague purposes if the result was not dictated by precedent existing at the time the defendant's conviction became final. Id. at 301, 109 S.Ct. 1060. Teague held that a new rule is retroactively applicable to cases on collateral review if and only if one of two exceptions apply: (1) the new rule places certain kinds of criminal conduct beyond the power of the criminal law-making authority to proscribe; or (2) the new rule is a watershed rule[] of criminal procedure that alter[s] our understanding of the bedrock procedural elements that must be found to vitiate the fairness of a particular conviction. Teague, 489 U.S. at 311, 109 S.Ct. 1060 (emphasis in original) (internal quotation marks omitted). By contrast, an old rule, applies on both direct and collateral review. See Whorton v. Bockting, 549 U.S. 406, 416, 127 S.Ct. 1173, 167 L.Ed.2d 1 (2007). Thus, if Padilla did not announce a new rule, then Mr. Orocio would be entitled to invoke the protection of Padilla even though his conviction had achieved finality and his sentence was fully served prior to Padilla. If Padilla announced a new rule, however, then Mr. Orocio would have to demonstrate that it falls within one of the very narrow Teague exceptions.
The government argues that Padilla is a new rule in two ways. First, it argues that Padilla is a new rule because it has extended Strickland 's Sixth Amendment analysis to a non-criminal settingnamely, the failure of criminal defense counsel to advise a client of the mandatory civil removal consequences of pleading guilty to drug trafficking charges. It is true that the precise question of whether the civil removal consequences of a plea are within the scope of Strickland had never been addressed by the Supreme Court before Padilla. But that is an incomplete approach to the Strickland question presented in this case. The question we confront is whether counsel has been constitutionally adequate in advising a criminal defendant whether to accept a plea bargain. The Court held only one year after Strickland that the same two-part standard [of Strickland ] ... [is] applicable to ineffective-assistance claims arising out of the plea process, and a court must therefore determine whether counsel's advice [to accept a plea] was within the range of competence demanded of attorneys in criminal cases. See Hill v. Lockhart, 474 U.S. 52, 56-57, 106 S.Ct. 366, 88 L.Ed.2d 203 (1985) (internal quotation marks omitted). In Padilla, the Court relied on recent changes in our immigration law [that] have made removal nearly an automatic result for a broad class of noncitizen offenders. Padilla, 130 S.Ct. at 1481. Moreover, the Padilla Court noted that it had never applied a distinction between direct and collateral consequences to define the scope of constitutionally `reasonable professional assistance' required under Strickland,  a distinction ill-suited for removal scenarios. Id. at 1481-82. The application of Strickland to the Padilla scenario is not so removed from the broader outlines of precedent as to constitute a new rule, for the Court had long required effective assistance of counsel on all important decisions, Strickland, 466 U.S. at 688, 104 S.Ct. 2052, in plea bargaining that could affect[ ] the outcome of the plea process, Hill, 474 U.S. at 59, 106 S.Ct. 366. In that light, Padilla is best read as merely recognizing that a plea agreement's immigration consequences constitute the sort of information an alien defendant needs in making important decisions affecting the outcome of the plea process, and thereby come within the ambit of the more particular duties to consult with the defendant required of effective counsel. Strickland, 466 U.S. at 688, 104 S.Ct. 2052. Far from extending the Strickland rule into uncharted territory, Padilla reaffirmed defense counsel's obligations to the criminal defendant during the plea process, a critical stage in the proceedings. Second, the government argues that Padilla clearly broke new ground regarding counsel's duty to advise her client about [removal], and was not `dictated' by prior Supreme Court[ [6] ] precedent. We are convinced that Padilla did not br[eak] new ground in holding that counsel must inform a criminal defendant of the immigration consequences of a guilty plea in order to be constitutionally adequate. Although the Padilla Court acknowledged that some courts had previously held that the `failure of defense counsel to advise the defendant of possible [removal] consequences is not cognizable as a claim for ineffective assistance of counsel,' 130 S.Ct. at 1481, the Court straightforwardly applied the Strickland ruleand the norms of the legal profession that insist upon adequate warning to criminal defendants of immigration consequencesto the facts of Jose Padilla's case. See id. at 1482 ( Strickland applies to Padilla's claim.... Under Strickland, we first determine whether counsel's representation fell below an objective standard of reasonableness. (internal quotation marks omitted)). At bottom, our inquiry focuses on whether Padilla 's application of the Strickland standard to a new factual context is a new rule for Teague purposes. The Strickland standard provides sufficient guidance for resolving virtually all ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claims. Lewis v. Johnson, 359 F.3d 646, 655 (3d Cir.2004) (internal quotation marks omitted). In Lewis, the most recent instance in which we performed this kind of analysis, we sought to determine whether the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Flores-Ortega, 528 U.S. 470, 480, 120 S.Ct. 1029, 145 L.Ed.2d 985 (2000), holding that counsel has a duty to consult with his client about taking an appeal under certain circumstances, announced a new rule. We found that it did not, and in doing so, discussed in some detail the appropriate retroactivity analysis for cases involving Strickland. Looking to the intersection of Strickland and Teague, we made three observations that guide the new rule inquiry: (1) case law need not exist on all fours to allow for a finding under Teague that the rule at issue was dictated by ... precedent, Lewis, 359 F.3d at 655; (2)  Strickland is a rule of general applicability which asks whether counsel's conduct was objectively reasonable and conformed to professional norms based `on the facts of the particular case, viewed as of the time of counsel's conduct,' id. (quoting Strickland, 466 U.S. at 690, 104 S.Ct. 2052 (emphasis in quotation)); and (3) `it will be the infrequent case that yields a result so novel that it forges a new rule, one not dictated by precedent,' id. (quoting Wright v. West, 505 U.S. 277, 308-09, 112 S.Ct. 2482, 120 L.Ed.2d 225 (1992) (Kennedy, J., concurring in judgment) (emphasis omitted)). [T]he Strickland Court identified `certain basic duties' that ... criminal defense attorneys must carry out to perform competently within the meaning of the Sixth Amendment, including a duty to consult with the defendant on important decisions. Id. at 656 (internal quotation marks omitted) (emphasis omitted). When the Supreme Court decides a Strickland case with novel facts, we do not place emphasis on the particular duty identified by the [Supreme] Court ... as a basis for classifying th[e] rule as `new' for Teague purposes. Id. at 655 (emphasis in original). We look instead to precedents and then-existing professional norms to determine whether the decision broke ... new ground. Id. at 656. Padilla followed from the clearly established principles of the guarantee of effective assistance of counsel. Strickland and Hill required counsel to advise criminal defendants at the plea stage in accordance with precedent and prevailing professional norms to ensure that the defendant makes an informed, knowing, and voluntary decision whether to plead guilty. Padilla is set within the confines of Strickland and Hill, as it concerns what advice an attorney must give to a criminal defendant at the plea stage. When Mr. Orocio pled guilty, it was hardly novel for counsel to provide advice to defendants at the plea stage concerning the immigration consequences of a guilty plea, undoubtedly an important decision for a defendant. See Padilla, 130 S.Ct. at 1485 (For at least the past 15 years, professional norms have generally imposed an obligation on counsel to provide advice on the [removal] consequences of a client's plea.). Padilla merely clarified the law as it applied to the particular facts of that case. Cf. Lewis, 359 F.3d at 655. We therefore hold that Padilla broke no new ground in holding the duty to consult also extended to counsel's obligation to advise the defendant of the immigration consequences of a guilty plea and did not `yield[ ] a result so novel that it forge[d] a new rule.' See id. at 657, 655 (alterations in original). The government relies heavily on Justice Alito's observation in Padilla that [u]ntil today, the longstanding and unanimous position of the federal courts was that reasonable defense counsel generally need only advise a client about the direct consequences of a criminal conviction. [7] 130 S.Ct. at 1487 (Alito, J., concurring in the judgment). The government sees this as convincing evidence that Padilla announced a new rule. However, Strickland did not freeze into place the objective standards of attorney performance prevailing in 1984, never to change again. See 466 U.S. at 688, 104 S.Ct. 2052 (The Sixth Amendment ... relies instead on the legal profession's maintenance of standards....' (emphasis added)). The Court's opinion in Padilla reiterated this reference to the practice and expectations of the legal community: `The proper measure of attorney performance remains simply reasonableness under prevailing professional norms.' 130 S.Ct. at 1482 (quoting Strickland, 466 U.S. at 688, 104 S.Ct. 2052); id. (We have long recognized that `[p]revailing norms of practice as reflected in American Bar Association Standards and the like ... are guides to determining what is reasonable....' (alterations in original) (quoting Strickland, 466 U.S. at 688, 104 S.Ct. 2052)). Lower court decisions not in harmony with Padilla were, with few exceptions, decided before 1995 and pre-date the professional norms that, as the Padilla court recognized, had long demanded that competent counsel provide advice on the removal consequences of a client's plea. [8] Padilla, 130 S.Ct. at 1485. While at the time of those early decisions courts had not yet recognized that a lawyer fails in his professional duty when he does not advise an alien client of the potentially grave immigration consequences of a guilty plea, by 2004, when Mr. Orocio pled guilty, the norms of effective assistancenorms keyed to contemporaneous professional standardshad become far more demanding. Every Strickland claim requires a fact-specific inquiry, but it is not the case that every Strickland ruling on new facts requires the announcement of a new rule. We have held in Lewis, 359 F.3d at 655, quoting Justice Kennedy's observations in Wright, 505 U.S. at 308-09, 112 S.Ct. 2482 (Kennedy, J., concurring in the judgment), that under rules that require a `case-by-case examination of the evidence, ... we can tolerate a number of specific applications without saying that those applications themselves create a new rule.' Accordingly, a court's disposition of each individual factual scenario arising under the long-established Strickland standard is not in each instance a new rule, but rather a new application of an old rule in a manner dictated by precedent. Padilla is no different. Indeed, close scrutiny of the Padilla opinion leads us to consider it not unlikely that the Padilla Court anticipated the retroactive application of its holding on collateral review when it considered the effect its decision would have on final convictions: We have given serious consideration to the concerns that the Solicitor General, respondent, and amici have stressed regarding the importance of protecting the finality of convictions obtained through guilty pleas.[ [9] ] We confronted a similar floodgates concern in Hill, but nevertheless applied Strickland to a claim that counsel had failed to advise the client regarding his parole eligibility before he pleaded guilty.... A flood did not follow in that decision's wake. 130 S.Ct. at 1484-85 (citation omitted) (footnote omitted). We therefore hold that, because Padilla followed directly from Strickland and long-established professional norms, it is an old rule for Teague purposes and is retroactively applicable on collateral review. [10] Mr. Orocio is thus entitled to the benefit of its holding.