Archive | ineffective assistance of counsel

Ramchair v. Conway, No. 08-2004-pr (2d Cir. April 2, 2010)(Winter, Calabresi, Sack, CJJ)

It seems as if most Second Circuit habeas decisions deal only with the procedural hurdles faced by state prisoners. So it is indeed remarkable that the court has decided two cases less than one week apart in which it got through the procedural thicket and actually resolved the substantive issue presented in the case. This decision, in which the court agrees that the petitioner’s state court appellate counsel was constitutionally ineffective, is accordingly blog-worthy.

The case has a long history. Ramchair was charged with a 1995 robbery after he was identified in a fairly suspect lineup, at which his counsel was present. He moved to suppress the identification and, after a hearing, the trial court denied the motion. He then had two trials that ended in mistrials, but at which the issue of counsel’s presence at the …

United States v. Yauri, No. 08-1105-cr (2d Cir. March 12, 2009)(Sack, Wesley, CJJ, Kahn, DJ) (per curiam)

In Yauri’s money laundering plea agreement, the government agreed to a two-level reduction for a “global disposition” and to a loss amount of “more than $30,000.” His presentence report, however, recommended guidelines calculation based on a loss of more than $154,000 and omitted the global disposition reduction. At sentencing, his counsel, who had not attended the plea hearing, did not object to the omission of the global reduction, and agreed that the loss amount in the presentence report was correct, despite the language in the plea agreement and the fact that Yauri had not allocuted to a specific loss amount.

On appeal, he argued that his counsel was ineffective, and the government agreed, but only with respect to the failure to call the court’s attention to the global disposition reduction. The court agreed, …