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Monday, October 31, 2011

Courts - "Two Cases Tied To Dubious Legal Advice Reach High Court"

That is the heading to Nina Totenberg's story this morning on NPR's Morning Edition. A quote:

On Monday the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments in two cases involving defendants who claim they were mauled, not by the system, but by their own lawyers.

In both cases, the defendants claim that their lawyers' conduct was so bad that it amounted to ineffective assistance of counsel, denying them the legal help that the Constitution says they are entitled to when facing criminal charges. And in both cases prosecutors claim the Constitution only guarantees a right to a fair trial, not a fair plea bargain.

Adam Liptak of the NY Times also reports on the cases today in his column headed "Supreme Court to Weigh Effects of Bad Plea Advice." A sample:
On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in the two cases, which ask how principles concerning bad legal work at trial should apply to plea bargains. The question is of surpassing importance, since a large majority of criminal cases are settled at the plea stage.

Last year, 97 percent of convictions in federal courts were the result of guilty pleas. In 2006, the last year for which data was available, the corresponding percentage in state courts was 94.

In the context of trials, it has long been established that defendants who can show that incompetent work by their lawyers probably affected the outcome are entitled to new trials.

Plea bargaining, on the other hand, “remained all but unregulated, a free market that sometimes resembled a Turkish bazaar,” Stephanos Bibas, a professor of law and criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote recently in The California Law Review.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on October 31, 2011 09:24 AM
Posted to Courts in general