Ineffective assistance of counsel
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Ineffective assistance of counsel is an issue raised in legal malpractice suits and in appeals in criminal cases where a criminal defendant asserts that their criminal conviction occurred because their attorney failed to properly defend the case. In order to prevail on such a claim, the plaintiff or appellant must show two things:
- Deficient performance by counsel.
- But for such deficiency, the result of the proceeding would have differed.
Because a convicted criminal must essentially prove that they would have been found innocent in order for the quality of counsel to be an issue, appeals based on ineffective assistance of counsel rarely succeed. Furthermore, some states limit the use of this appeal to mistakes the counsel made at trial.
In Strickland v. Washington (1984), the Supreme Court of the United States established that failure to inform a defendant of the direct consequences of a sentence qualifies as ineffective assistance of counsel, but failure to inform of collateral consequences of criminal charges does not.
