Court Opinion

ID: 9413261
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-01 22:55:45.590065+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T16:42:10.158935
License: Public Domain

Chief Justice Roberts,
with whom Justice Scalia, Justice Thomas, and Justice Alito join,
dissenting.
I dissent from the Court’s decision to grant the petition, vacate the judgment, and remand the case. The Court does this in deference to the Government’s suggestion that the Court of Appeals ignored petitioners’ nonconstitutional claim of ineffective assistance of counsel. The Government does not, however, take the position that the judgment reached by the Court of Appeals was incorrect, and this Court has not independently examined the merits of that judgment. In such circumstances, there are insufficient grounds for vacating the judgment below. See Nunez v. United States, 554 U.S. 911, 912, 128 S. Ct. 2990, 171 L. Ed. 2d 879 (2008) (Scalia, J., dissenting).
*176This disposition is especially inappropriate in this case, as petitioners do not appear to have raised—in the Court of Appeals or in their petition for certio-rari—the claim that the Government asserts was ignored by the Court of Appeals. Petitioners argued below that their counsel’s poor performance deprived them of their constitutional right to the effective assistance of counsel. But they did not explicitly assert a right to effective assistance based on any source of law other than the Constitution. In their petition for certiorari, moreover, petitioners disclaimed any nonconstitutional basis for relief when they argued that, by denying the existence of a constitutional right to the effective assistance of counsel, the Fourth Circuit’s decision “allow [s] no recourse for a particular alien against dishonest or corrupt immigration practitioners.” Pet. for Cert. 11 (emphasis added). This sentence would make no sense if petitioners were advancing both constitutional and nonconstitutional grounds for relief on their claim.
Instead of granting, vacating, and remanding, I would deny the petition for certiorari.