Court backs right to an attorney on plea deals

WASHINGTON – Defendants in criminal cases have a constitutional right to a competent lawyer’s advice when deciding whether to accept a plea bargain, the Supreme Court ruled, providing a significant expansion of rights that could have a broad impact on the justice system.

“Ours for the most part is a system of pleas, not a system of trials,” Justice Anthony Kennedy said for the majority in a pair of 5-4 decisions. Noting that about 97 percent of federal convictions and 94 percent of state convictions result from guilty pleas, Kennedy wrote that “in today’s criminal justice system, the negotiation of a plea bargain, rather than the unfolding of a trial, is almost always the critical point for the defendant.”

The ruling drew a sharply worded dissent from Justice Antonin Scalia, who took the unusual step of expressing his disagreement in the courtroom. He angrily called the court’s rulings a “judicially invented right to effective plea bargaining.”

The decisions were “a vast departure from our past cases” and would lead to endless litigation, he warned.

“Until today, no one has thought that there is a constitutional right to a plea bargain,” he added.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito joined in dissent.

Until now, the vast majority of the high court’s decisions on the constitutional rights of criminal defendants had involved trials. Since plea deals are part of the daily routine in courthouses across the nation, expanding the Constitution’s reach into that arena could affect a large number of cases. But legal experts, like the justices themselves, differed on the precise impact.

Stanford law professor Jeffrey Fisher said the high court’s decision was significant because it puts the “imprimatur of the Supreme Court” on the rule that defendants have a right to competent legal advice during negotiations over a plea deal. That position “is basically consistent with the predominant view in the lower courts over the past several years,” he said, but had not previously been declared a nationwide rule by the highest court.

Since the 1980s, the court has said defendants have a right to “effective assistance of counsel,” and this guidance is crucial to protecting the right to a fair trial.

On Wednesday, Kennedy joined with the court’s four liberals – Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor – and made clear for the first time that a defendant’s right to a competent lawyer extends to decisions to accept or reject a plea offer from prosecutors.

Both cases involved men who were sent to prison for lengthy terms – one for assault and the other for drunken driving – who could have had much lighter sentences but for their lawyers’ mistakes.

No one suggested the attorneys must offer brilliant advice. Similarly, they cannot be faulted if their predictions about how a trial will go are proven wrong. But the lawyers must meet a standard of basic competence, the court said.

At minimum, Kennedy said, the lawyer has a duty to tell his client of any formal offers from a prosecutor that would result in a favorable deal.