Supreme Court protects immigrants against bad legal advice.

The US Supreme Court issued a major decision this week, whereby immigrants must be advised that pleading guilty to a criminal charge could result in removal (deportation).

In the case of Padilla vs. Kentucky, a Vietnam War veteran with permanent residence (green card) had lived in the US legally for over 40 years. He was arrested in 2001 after authorities found 1,000 lbs of marijuana in his truck. Mr. Padilla pleaded guilty to marijuana trafficking, after his criminal lawyer told him that the guilty plea would not affect his immigration status. In fact, this plea rendered Mr. Padilla removable.  

The US Supreme Court held that the bad legal advice constituted ineffective assistance of counsel.  There exact wording of the decision states that

It is our responsibility under the Constitution to ensure that no criminal defendant—whether a citizen or not—is left to the “mercies of incompetent counsel.” Richardson, 397 U. S., at 771. To satisfy this responsibility, we now hold that counsel must inform her client whether his plea carries a risk of deportation. Our longstanding Sixth Amendment precedents, the seriousness of deportation as a consequence of a criminal plea, and the concomitant impact of deportation on families living lawfully in this country demand no less. 

Because counsel must inform a client whether his plea carries a risk of deportation, Padilla has sufficiently alleged that his counsel was constitutionally deficient. Whether he is entitled to relief depends on whether he has been prejudiced, a matter not addressed here.

The New York Times wrote about the decision here . The full text of the Supreme Court decision is here.

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/yeowatzup/172651523/

Separating Fact From Fiction About Immigrants and Crime

An article in the ImmigrationImpact.com website debunks the myth that immigrants are more likely than others to commit crimes. The article states that:

Numerous national and state-level studies over the past hundred years have found immigrants are less likely than the native-born to commit crimes or be in prison, and high rates of immigration are not associated with higher crime rates.

The article quotes from recent articles in The Washington Post, and in the New York Times. They describe the NYT article thus:

In a different vein, the New York Times today ran a story on the rising number of federal prosecutions for immigration offenses [as opposed to actual violent crimes], which the Department of Justice ostensibly has pursued with increased vigor as part of the government’s broader counterterrorism strategy. But, the story notes, while immigration prosecutions have skyrocketed over the past five years, “white-collar prosecutions have fallen by 18 percent, weapons prosecutions have dropped by 19 percent, organized crime prosecutions are down by 20 percent and public corruption prosecutions have dropped by 14 percent.” One might question the wisdom of devoting more and more resources to the prosecution of undocumented immigrants for “illegal entry” at the expense of, say, arms traffickers who actually do have an adverse impact on public safety.

As regards the last sentence - my thoughts exactly on reading that NYT article.