Source: The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Immigrants to the United States have a constitutional right to be told by their lawyers whether pleading guilty to a crime could lead to their deportation, the U.S. Supreme Court said today.
The high court’s ruling extends the Constitution’s Sixth Amendment guarantee of “effective assistance of counsel” in criminal cases to immigration advice, especially in cases that involve deportation.
“The severity of deportation — the equivalent of banishment or exile — only underscores how critical it is for counsel to inform her noncitizen client that he faces a risk of deportation,“ said Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the opinion for the court.
The ruling came in the case of Jose Padilla, who was born in Honduras. Padilla asked the high court to throw out his 2001 guilty plea to drug charges in Kentucky, which made his deportation virtually mandatory.
