Wrong Advice About Civil Commitment Law Constitutes Ineffective Assistance of Counsel

Last spring, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Padilla v. Kentucky that an attorney’s incorrect advice regarding the deportation consequences of a guilty plea might violate the client’s Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel.  Padilla was a surprisingly broadly worded expansion of the Sixth Amendment right into the realm of advice on the collateral consequences of a conviction.  Although Padilla raised more questions than it answered, the decision may prove an extraordinarily important one in light of the proliferation of collateral consequences over the past couple of decades.

Now the Eleventh Circuit has indicated that Padilla does indeed extend beyond deportation advice.  In Bauder v. Dep’t of Corrections (No. 10-10657), the court affirmed a grant of habeas relief based on an attorney’s incorrect advice that the petitioner would not face the possibility of civil commitment as a sexually violent predator if he pled no contest to a stalking charge.

In addition to its extension of the Padilla reasoning to a new collateral consequence, Bauder strikes me as quite significant for at least two reasons.  

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Burglary, Violence, and the Armed Career Criminal Act

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics has issued a new report on victimization during household burglary, which might have important implications for the application of the Armed Career Criminal Act.  First, here are the report’s highlights on the burglary-violence connection:

  • A household member is present in about one-quarter of residential burlgaries.
  • A household member is violently vicitmized in about seven percent of residential burglaries (or about one-quarter of the burglaries in which a household member is present).
  • In residential burglaries, simple asault is the most common violent crime (3.7 percent of all burlgaries), while more serious violent crimes like rape (0.6 percent) and aggravated assault (1.3 percent) are far less frequent.
  • In a majority of even the “violent” burglaries, the victim indicates there is no injury; a “serious injury” is sustained in only 8.5 percent of the violent burglaries.
  • In the violent burglaries, fewer than forty percent of the offenders are armed.

Now, for the ACCA link. 

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New Criminal Law Blog

I’ve recently launched Life Sentences Blog (http://www.lifesentencesblog.com/), in which I intend to track new legal developments and research relating to long prison sentences.  Here’s how I explain my interests in the “About” page:

I am using this blog as a way to organize new information and ideas about sentencing and related topics, and to do a little “thinking out loud.” If the blog is also helpful to others, then so much the better. Since there are already a number of outstanding blogs that track sentencing and criminal law, the reader may be interested to know my particular areas of focus: federal sentencing law (especially Seventh Circuit), Wisconsin sentencing law, life without parole, post-conviction remedies, prisoner rights, victim rights, prisoner reentry, restorative justice, punishment theory, drug crime, history of crime and punishment, and the psychology of punishment and blaming. The questions that most interest me right now relate to the use of long prison terms (say, twenty years and up)–why do we use this type of punishment, when is it appropriate, how is its use structured by the law, how is long-term imprisonment experienced by inmates, and so forth.

I hope to have fresh posts up most days — at least until final exam season rolls around.

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