More than a decade ago, Rolando Stockton rejected a plea bargain that came with a ten-year prison sentence, opting instead to take his chances at trial. The trial went badly. After being found guilty on several drug and firearm charges, Stockton received a forty-year prison sentence. From an objective point of view, Stockton should have taken the deal; rejecting it cost him thirty years of freedom. In postconviction proceedings, Stockton proffered a reason for his poor judgment: his lawyer failed to disclose to him the maximum sentence he faced at trial and the advantages of the ten-year deal. In spite of his admittedly hazy memory of the events, the lawyer disagreed, claiming he told Stockton that the plea deal was a “good offer.” Without clear evidence, the reviewing court sided with Stockton’s lawyer. On that finding, Stockton lost his claim, and he is still serving his initial sentence today.
Under the recent Supreme Court decisions in Lafler v. Cooper and Missouri v. Frye, defense counsel has a duty to inform and reasonably advise clients about plea offers from the prosecution, so that defendants do not forego favorable plea bargains due to the ineffective assistance of their counsel. Yet the story above demonstrates a fundamental problem with these new duties: the lack of a record of the plea bargaining process makes them unenforceable. Without such a record, the defendants, who bear the burden of proof in Sixth Amendment ineffective assistance of counsel claims, have no evidence to support claims of defective advice. Their hopes thus rest on the cooperation of the very lawyers they accuse of being ineffective. When combined with the other difficulties inherent in establish-ing an ineffective assistance of counsel claim, this problem renders the new right toothless.
In this Comment, I propose that the criminal defense bar adopt a practice of recording the plea bargaining process in order to better protect defendants’ Sixth Amendment rights. I begin in Part I with a brief background of Sixth Amendment right-to-counsel jurisprudence, the plea bargaining process, and the evolution of the Supreme Court’s views on these topics.