Court Opinion

ID: 9480282
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 07:43:16.526664+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:47:34.990165
License: Public Domain

MIKVA, Circuit Judge,
concurring in the judgment:
The majority holds that trial counsel’s failure to warn Del Rosario about the possible deportation consequences of entering a guilty plea did not constitute ineffective assistance of counsel. The court reaches this conclusion despite the trial judge’s holding to the contrary. When this decision is combined with precedents holding that a judge taking a plea in a Rule 11 proceeding is not required to inform a defendant of deportation consequences of a guilty plea, see, e.g., Fruchtman v. Kenton, 531 F.2d 946, 948-49 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 429 U.S. 895, 97 S.Ct. 256, 50 L.Ed.2d 178 (1976), the result is extremely troubling. Under existing law, a defendant wholly ignorant of the possibility that he may be deported as a result of pleading guilty will nonetheless be held to this plea — and its harsh consequences — as long as he was not affirmatively misled by court or counsel about the impact of pleading guilty. In the case at hand, the court was made aware of the defendant’s alien status, but defendant’s counsel and the government offered confusing and conflicting information about the consequences of a guilty plea. It is most disturbing that this fact situation does not put in question the effectiveness of counsel’s representation.
Current teaching about allowing a defendant to withdraw a guilty plea is stretched to its limits when the majority casts the district judge as “Maximum Juror” by reviewing as a “finding of fact” his guesstimate about what a jury would have done had the case gone to trial. No trial judge can be comfortable in such a role. Deportation is indeed a “harsh collateral consequence.” It can result “in loss ... of all that makes life worth living.” Ng Fung Ho v. White, 259 U.S. 276, 284, 42 S.Ct. 492, 495, 66 L.Ed. 938 (1922). It is unlike losing one’s driver’s license, or the right to own firearms, or the right to a government job — each of which the majority describes as a similarly weighty deprivation. The possibility of being deported can be — and frequently is — the most important factor in a criminal defendant’s decision how to plead. Because deportation is in a category so obviously distinct from the other collateral consequences enumerated by the majority, I have sore difficulty crediting the fiction that the defendant has knowingly pled when he is not provided meaningful information about the relevant deportation consequences of his plea.
I would hope that the Rules Committee of the Judicial Conference would consider amending Rule 11 of the Rules of Criminal Procedure to require a judge taking a guilty plea to inform an alien that pleading guilty might result in deportation — at least when the judge is made aware of the defendant’s alien status before accepting his plea. I do not seek to frustrate the undeniable benefits of resolving prosecutions through a streamlined and efficient Rule 11 proceeding. Yet, the validity of such proceedings is unequivocally premised upon the defendant’s knowing the most significant consequences of his plea. Rule 11 requires that a defendant be told the punishment allowed under the guilty plea; it should similarly require that such a major consequence as deportation also be put in the praecognita.