Over a dissent from two of the court’s liberal justices, the Supreme Court turned down an appeal asking them to decide whether a criminal-defense attorney is required to initiate negotiations with prosecutors when his client is likely to get a better result from a plea deal. The denial of review on Tuesday in the case of Quartavious Davis, who was a teenager when he was convicted for his role in a string of armed robberies in south Florida in 2010, came as part of a list of orders from the justices’ private conference last week.
Davis’s co-defendants entered guilty pleas and received substantially lighter sentences, but Davis went to trial, where he was convicted and sentenced to more than 160 years in prison. In post-conviction proceedings, Davis argued unsuccessfully that his trial attorney’s failure to seek a plea deal violated his constitutional right to competent assistance from a lawyer. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled that because Davis had not alleged that prosecutors had offered a plea deal, he could not show that he had been harmed by his attorney’s failure to seek such a deal – a key component of an ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claim.
Davis then came to the Supreme Court, which
on Tuesday rejected his plea to weigh in. In a three-page dissent from
the denial of review, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson – joined by Justice
Sonia Sotomayor – noted that the courts of appeals had reached different
conclusions on the question at the heart of Davis’s case. Moreover,
Jackson added, this would have been an ideal case for the justices to
consider that question, because “it was exceedingly likely that Davis
would have prevailed” if he had not been required to show that
prosecutors had offered a plea deal.
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