One notable case showing impact and import of Lafler and Frye

The Wall Street Journal has this new piece reporting on how the Supreme Court’s landmark opinions earlier this year concerning ineffective assistance of counsel and plea bargaining has impacted one notable case. The piece is headlined “Decisions Open Door to Appeals of Plea Bargains,” and here are excerpts:

Two recent Supreme Court decisions helped win freedom for a California man who was given a 25-year minimum sentence after pleading guilty to passing a bad check, the latest development in a legal re-evaluation of the rights of defendants who engage in plea bargains.  In late September, a three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a hearing into possible missteps by an attorney representing Tyrone W. Miles.

Mr. Miles had alleged he received inadequate legal counsel when he cut a deal with state prosecutors in 2005 for using a bogus $474 check in a convenience store in Hanford, the central-California town where he lived.  As a result, the 42-year-old Navy veteran said he lost out on a plea bargain that would have given him a six-year sentence instead of the 25 years to life he received when he later did plead guilty under California’s so-called “three strikes” law for repeat offenders.  The attorney allegedly counseled Mr. Miles to reject the six-year deal without checking to see that his client faced possible life imprisonment under the three-strikes law.

In the wake of the September court decision and the November election in which California voters agreed to modify the three-strikes law, the two sides in the Miles case petitioned the appellate court to issue an order directing that Mr. Miles be freed in the near future. The appellate court issued that order on Wednesday….

The Ninth Circuit’s September decision cited two Supreme Court decisions, both issued in March, in which the high court found defendants in two other cases hadn’t been adequately represented by their attorneys during the plea-bargain process….

Judges and legal observers view the high court’s rulings as a major shift in the standards that govern plea bargaining, a widely used legal strategy in which defendants plead guilty to one or more charges usually in exchange for a lighter punishment than they would receive if they went to trial and lost.  Plea bargaining allows criminal cases to be settled more quickly and with less expense than a jury trial….

As the Supreme Court rulings percolate through the judicial system, there will be many more cases where defendants challenge their plea deals based on inadequate assistance of counsel, said David Carroll, executive director of the Sixth Amendment Center, a Boston-based nonprofit that focuses on legal representation for indigent defendants. The Ninth Circuit decision “is the tip of the iceberg,” he said.

Critics worry that the Supreme Court decisions could clog the judicial system with questionable plea-bargain appeals.  In his dissent to one of the court’s decisions in March, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the majority’s position “elevates plea bargaining from a necessary evil to a constitutional entitlement” and “opens a whole new boutique of constitutional jurisprudence.”