Ineffective assistance of counsel (United States) facts for kids
Ineffective assistance of counsel means that a lawyer (also called "counsel") did not help their client enough during a trial. People who have been found guilty of a crime can sometimes say that their lawyer didn't do a good job. They might argue that because their lawyer didn't help them properly, their trial wasn't fair.
"Ineffective" means something didn't work as it should. "Assistance" means "help." "Counsel" is a legal word for "lawyer." So, when someone claims "ineffective assistance of counsel," they are saying, "my defense lawyer didn't help me enough."
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Your Right to a Lawyer
The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the U.S. Constitution. It says that people accused of a crime have the right to "the assistance of counsel for his defence." This means you have a right to have a lawyer help you.
When someone claims their lawyer was ineffective, they are saying their lawyer was so bad that they didn't really get this important right to a lawyer.
But the Sixth Amendment didn't explain much more about this right. For example, it didn't say:
- Did the lawyer have to be a good lawyer? If so, how good?
- How could the law decide if a lawyer was good enough for a fair trial?
- What should happen if someone had an unfair trial because their lawyer was ineffective?
The Strickland v. Washington Case
The Supreme Court, which is the highest court in the United States, tried to answer some of these questions in a case called Strickland v. Washington in 1984.
The court decided that a person would have to show two main things to prove their lawyer was ineffective. This is known as the "Strickland test":
- First, their lawyer made serious mistakes. These mistakes were so bad that the lawyer wasn't acting like the "counsel" (lawyer) that the Sixth Amendment promises.
- Second, the lawyer's mistakes caused the trial to be unfair. If the person had a good lawyer, the result of their trial would have been different. For example, they might have been found not guilty.
The second part of this test is very important. After the Strickland case, some appeals courts (courts that review decisions from lower courts) said that convictions were still legal even when the defense lawyer:
- Fell asleep during the trial.
- Was very old and confused.
- Had a mental illness and talked about strange things during the trial.
- Had committed a serious crime himself and was working as a lawyer as part of his punishment, even though he had no legal training.
These cases did not count as "ineffective assistance of counsel." This was because the people bringing the cases could not prove the second part of the "Strickland test." They couldn't show that if they had different lawyers, their trials would have ended differently. The courts decided there was so much evidence against them that even a different lawyer couldn't have changed the outcome.
Ineffective Lawyers and the Death Penalty
The issue of ineffective lawyers is very important in the discussion about the death penalty.
The University of Michigan Law School keeps a list of people who were sentenced to death but later found innocent. These people were "exonerated," meaning they were officially cleared because new evidence showed they were innocent.
Between 1989 and 2015, 116 people on death row were found innocent and set free.
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