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.