Supreme Court makes key ruling in Sixth Amendment rights case
Understandably, most of the oxygen in the room regarding recent Supreme Court decisions has been absorbed by the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that had enshrined federal protections for abortions for 50 years.
Some other decisions have also garnered attention, such as Citizens United regarding unrestricted PAC money, the decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act and the decision that effectively neutered the Environmental Protection Agency.
But there was another recent Supreme Court decision that fell under the radar and is extremely important for criminal defendants and their Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel.
This decision essentially stated that lawyers don’t get to ignore their clients’ directions on critical issues, that clients can insist their counsel refrain from promoting their own legal strategy when it contradicts the explicit instructions given to them by their clients (McCoy v. Louisiana, 2018).
The McCoy case involved a client, Robert
Leroy McCoy, who was tried for murder and instructed his lawyer not to concede his guilt to the jury. McCoy’s lawyer ignored his client’s vigorous objections and stated that his client did commit the crime to improve his client’s chances of avoiding the death penalty.
The Supreme Court ruled that the Sixth Amendment guarantees a client’s right to choose the objective of his defense and insists that counsel refrain from admitting guilt, even when counsel’s experience-based view was that confessing offered the best chance to avoid the death penalty.
A similar development occurred in my own misdemeanor misconduct case 11 years ago (State v. Leopold, 2013). When I asked my counsel to cross-examine the state’s primary witness and confront her with her contradictory grand jury testimony, he declined, saying that I “should stay focused on what’s important. This is not a crime.”
To deny that the witness’s inflammatory testimony coloring the entire case was not “important” was, in my view, shortsighted and imprudent. The issue of whether it was appropriate to ask for assistance on any occasion could have been effectively addressed by her grand jury testimony.
She stated that she told me she “had a medical background” and was “not really affected” by her assistance which, for six weeks, and not the 10 months the witness claimed in her trial testimony, was providing a medical necessity: draining an anklebased catheter bag following back surgery.
Appearing before the Court of Special Appeals a year after the trial, my attorney stated that I stopped asking for assistance when my office assistant “said she would no longer do it.” This factually inaccurate statement amplified the false narrative of the state’s key witness that I continued to ask for assistance when I was able to help myself. In fact, this was an impossibility, because, after six weeks, I was no longer using catheter bags that required emptying.
When my attorney told me “there was no numeric threshold or tipping point which, when eclipsed, would render the underlying conduct criminal,” he was proven wrong. The Court of Special Appeals ruled that there was, in fact, a “tipping point” (the false claim that I continued to ask for assistance when I could help myself ) that made the behavior criminal misconduct and a “predatory, cruel and oppressive” abuse of power.
As a compliant, first-time criminal defendant, I was not sufficiently qualified to know if a defense lawyer’s refusal to submit exculpatory evidence amounted to malpractice. What I do know, however, is that whether my lawyer’s strategy was defensible is irrelevant, because he erred in promoting a position that I had explicitly rejected.
In effect, he stopped being my advocate and became my adversary. Clearly, it is the client who should be the decision-maker in these circumstances because it is the client who must bear the consequences, including the possibility of incarceration and an egregiously punitive fine.
Hopefully, my own case can be a warning for future criminal defendants to challenge their lawyers’ decisions and strategies they do not approve. The Supreme Court decision in McCoy v. Louisiana provides a solid legal basis for clients to insist that their Sixth Amendment right to effective representation includes the right to make decisions regarding legal strategy that counsel’s experience-based views, no matter how valid, cannot contradict.