CORDY, J.
In 2007, the defendant, Kempess Sylvain, a noncitizen lawfully residing in the United States, pleaded guilty to possession of a controlled substance, subjecting him to automatic deportation from the United States. After the defendant's conviction was final, we decided Commonwealth v. Clarke, 460 Mass. 30, 34, 37, 45 (2011) (Clarke), which held that the rule announced in Padilla v. Kentucky, 130 S.Ct. 1473, 1483, 1486 (2010) (Padilla), regarding a criminal defendant's right under the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution to accurate advice as to the deportation consequences of a guilty plea, was not a "new" rule under Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288, 301, 310 (1989) (Teague), and therefore applied retroactively to cases on collateral review. Thereafter, the defendant filed a motion for a new trial seeking to vacate his guilty plea on the ground that his attorney was constitutionally deficient in erroneously advising him that there would be no deportation consequences stemming from his guilty plea. The defendant's motion was denied, and he timely appealed. While the defendant's appeal was pending, the United States Supreme Court decided Chaidez v. United States, 133 S.Ct. 1103, 1105, 1111 (2013) (Chaidez), which held that Padilla did announce a "new" rule under Teague and, thus, does not apply retroactively to collateral challenges under Federal law. We granted the defendant's application for direct appellate review to consider whether we should continue to give Padilla retroactive effect in light of Chaidez.
We conclude, as a matter of Massachusetts law and consistent
Having decided that the defendant may seek relief under the Sixth Amendment and art. 12, we conclude that although the defendant's counsel's erroneous advice may have been constitutionally inadequate, without additional findings we are unable to determine whether the defendant was sufficiently prejudiced to warrant vacating his guilty plea and ordering a new trial. Consequently, we remand the case to the Boston Municipal Court judge for further findings and proceedings consistent with this opinion.
Background. The material facts are not in dispute. On the morning of April 15, 2007, a Boston police officer patrolling along Blue Hill Avenue in the Dorchester section of Boston witnessed the defendant engaging in a sexual act with a prostitute. As the officer approached, the defendant removed several small plastic baggies from his coat pocket and placed them in his mouth. Believing that the baggies contained "crack" cocaine and fearing that the defendant might overdose, the officer attempted to intercede. Although the defendant ingested the drugs, a subsequent search of his jacket revealed an additional baggie of "crack" cocaine. The incident took place within 1,000 feet of a child care center.
Following his arrest, the defendant was charged with one
In January, 2012, the defendant filed a motion to vacate his guilty plea pursuant to Mass. R. Crim. P. 30(b), as appearing in 435 Mass. 1501 (2001). Citing Padilla, supra, and Clarke, supra, the defendant contended that, as a noncitizen, "he was denied effective assistance of counsel when his trial counsel failed to advise him of the immigration consequences that could result from his guilty plea" and, therefore, the "plea was obtained in violation of his rights under the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution and Article 12 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights."
In support of his motion, the defendant submitted an affidavit of his counsel averring that, "At the time I represented [the
Discussion. The defendant urges us to continue to apply Padilla retroactively, despite the Supreme Court's decision in Chaidez. In particular, he contends that Danforth, supra at 282, allows us to continue to apply the retroactivity framework from Teague, supra, but nevertheless reach a divergent conclusion from Chaidez. Specifically, he asserts that despite the Supreme Court's conclusion in Chaidez that Padilla announced a "new" rule, we are free to arrive at the opposite conclusion as a matter of State law and, by doing so, provide greater protection for defendants challenging their convictions on collateral review. Alternatively, the defendant urges us to recognize a remedy under art. 12 that parallels the Sixth Amendment right enunciated in Padilla.
The Commonwealth responds by construing the defendant's argument about the retroactivity of the Sixth Amendment right
1. Retroactivity. a. Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel following Padilla. In Padilla, supra at 1486, the United States Supreme Court held that the Sixth Amendment requires a criminal defense attorney to provide accurate advice regarding the deportation consequences arising from a guilty plea. According to the Court, failure to provide such advice is a "constitutional deficiency" that satisfies the first prong of the test for ineffective assistance of counsel under Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668 (1984) (Strickland).
In Clarke, we concluded that "[t]here is no question that the holding in Padilla is an extension of the rule in Strickland," Clarke, supra at 37, and that Padilla is the "definitive application of an established constitutional standard on a case-by-case basis, incorporating evolving professional norms[
However, according to the Court, Padilla "did something more" than "merely [make] clear that a lawyer who neglects to inform a client about the risk of deportation is professionally incompetent." Chaidez, supra at 1108. Specifically, Padilla considered the unsettled preliminary question whether "advice about deportation [was] `categorically removed' from the scope of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel because it involved only a `collateral consequence' of a conviction, rather than a component of the criminal sentence."
The decision in Chaidez was not unanimous. Justice Sotomayor, with whom Justice Ginsburg joined, penned a dissenting opinion that took an entirely different view of the interrelationship between the Strickland standard and the Court's decision in Padilla, one more akin to our reasoning in Clarke. The dissent began by pointing out that "the proper measure of attorney performance remains simply reasonableness under prevailing professional norms." Chaidez, supra at 1114 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting), quoting Strickland, supra at 688. Moreover, the reasonableness prong "takes its content from the standards by which lawyers judge their professional obligations ... and those standards are subject to change." Chaidez, supra at 1114 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting), citing Strickland, supra. For this reason, in Padilla, the Court's application of Strickland "followed naturally" from the "changes in immigration law and the accompanying evolution of professional norms" over the previous fifteen years. Chaidez, supra at 1116 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting).
b. Application of Padilla in Massachusetts following Chaidez. In Clarke, supra at 45, our analysis was concerned solely with the question whether, in the absence of Supreme Court guidance, the Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel, as explicated in Padilla, applied retroactively to cases on collateral review. We did not consider whether the right to the effective assistance of counsel under art. 12 also included the right to accurate advice from counsel concerning the deportation consequences of pleading guilty, or whether such a right might apply retroactively. Because the defendant raises claims under both the Sixth Amendment and art. 12, we address both avenues of potential relief.
i. Retroactivity of the Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel under Massachusetts law. Given that the Supreme Court's holding in Chaidez is plainly at odds with our decision in Clarke, the question is whether we may give broader retroactive effect to Padilla as a matter of State law than it would otherwise enjoy under Federal law.
As discussed above, the Supreme Court's test for retroactivity is set forth in Teague, supra at 307, and its progeny.
Although we consider the retroactivity framework established in Teague to be sound in principle, the Supreme Court's post-Teague expansion of what qualifies as a "new" rule has become so broad that "decisions defining a constitutional safeguard rarely merit application on collateral review." Colwell v. State, 118 Nev. 807, 818, cert. denied, 540 U.S. 981 (2003). As discussed above, according to the original formulation discussed in Teague, supra at 301, "a case announce[d] a new rule if the result was not dictated by precedent" at the time the defendant's conviction became final. In its subsequent jurisprudence, however, the Supreme Court has greatly expanded the meaning of what is "new" to include results not "apparent to all reasonable jurists" at the time. Lambrix v. Singletary, 520 U.S. 518, 527-528 (1997).
Although we adopted the Teague retroactivity framework in Bray, supra, including the Court's original construction of what constitutes a "new" rule, we have not specifically considered whether we ought to incorporate the Supreme Court's broadened
In Danforth, supra at 266, the Supreme Court considered whether the retroactivity analysis of Teague "constrains the authority of [S]tate courts to give broader effect to new rules of criminal procedure than is required by that opinion."
In this manner, the Court drew an important distinction between the existence of a Federal substantive right or remedy, the contours of which are fixed by Federal law, and the procedural availability of such a right, the scope of which may be set by State law. See Danforth, supra ("Any State could surely have
As it pertains here, Chaidez concluded that Padilla announced a "new" rule under Teague. However, based on our authority to conduct an independent review, "[we] are not required to blindly follow that court's view of what constitutes a new rule." Rhoades v. State, 149 Idaho 130, 139 (2010), cert. denied, 131 S.Ct. 1571 (2011). Instead, we reserve our prerogative to define and determine within the Bray framework whether a rule is "new." The Supreme Courts of other States have come to the same conclusion. See State v. Smart, 202 P.3d 1130, 1138-1140 (Alaska 2009); Rhoades v. State, supra; Danforth v. State, supra at 500; Colwell v. State, supra.
We conclude that Padilla did not announce a "new" rule for the purposes of our retroactivity test under Bray. Our opinion is informed in part by our continued adherence to our analysis in Clarke and Justice Sotomayor's dissent in Chaidez. In brief, Padilla did not announce a "new" rule for the simple reason that it applied a general standard — designed to change according to the evolution of existing professional norms — to a specific factual situation. See Clarke, supra at 36, 38-39, 43; Chaidez, supra at 1114-1116 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting). We also are not persuaded that Massachusetts precedent at the time Padilla was decided would have dictated an outcome contrary to that in Padilla. Indeed, long before Padilla was decided, it was customary for practitioners in Massachusetts to warn their clients of the possible deportation consequences of pleading guilty. See Clarke, supra at 43 n.15. See also Padilla, supra at 1485.
ii. Article 12. The defendant also contends that his attorney's erroneous advice constituted ineffective assistance of counsel under art. 12. We have not expressly stated that art. 12 demands that defense counsel provide defendants with accurate advice concerning the deportation consequences of a guilty plea or conviction at trial. That such a right exists, however, is implicit in our recent decision in Commonwealth v. Marinho, 464 Mass. 115 (2013) (Marinho).
In Marinho, supra at 122, we considered whether defense counsel's failure to accurately advise the defendant of the potential immigration consequences of a conviction at trial constituted ineffective assistance of counsel under the Sixth Amendment and art. 12. In light of Padilla's broad language and the prevailing "expectation[s] in the Massachusetts legal community," we concluded that "defense counsel [has] a duty to inform a noncitizen client that conviction, whether by plea or by trial, may carry adverse immigration consequences." Marinho, supra at 125. We further determined that failure to provide such advice constitutes behavior that falls "measurably below that which might be expected from an ordinary fallible lawyer." Marinho, supra at 126, quoting Commonwealth v. Saferian, 366 Mass. 89, 96 (1974) (Saferian).
Although the defendant in Marinho framed his argument in terms of the guarantees of the Sixth Amendment and art. 12, our decision did not make clear whether the holding was based solely on a defendant's rights under the Sixth Amendment, or also based on our interpretation of the defendant's rights under art. 12. We take the opportunity today to clarify that under art. 12 defense counsel must accurately advise a noncitizen client of the deportation consequences of a guilty plea or a conviction at trial.
For the same reasons that we determined that the Sixth Amendment right enunciated in Padilla was not a "new" rule, we conclude that the defendant's coextensive right under art. 12 does not constitute a "new" rule. Like Strickland, supra at 688,
For these reasons, the defendant is entitled to assert his claim for ineffective assistance of counsel under art. 12 on collateral review.
2. Ineffective assistance of counsel. We now proceed to the merits of the defendant's appeal. In order prevail on his claim for ineffective assistance of counsel, the defendant bears the burden of showing that (1) there has been "behavior of counsel falling measurably below that which might be expected from an ordinary fallible lawyer" and (2) that "it has likely deprived the defendant of an otherwise available substantial ground of defence." Saferian, supra.
According to the defendant's counsel's affidavit, "I advised [the defendant] ... that this disposition was not likely to result in his deportation because it was a conviction for straight [p]ossession with a sentence of under a year." This advice was plainly
We are left to consider whether this deficient representation sufficiently prejudiced the defendant so as to justify vacating the defendant's guilty plea and ordering a new trial. "In the context of a guilty plea, in order to satisfy the `prejudice' requirement, the defendant has the burden of establishing that (1) `there is a reasonable probability that, but for counsel's errors, he would not have pleaded guilty and would have insisted on going to trial,'" Clarke, supra at 47, quoting Hill v. Lockhart, 474 U.S. 52, 59 (1985); and (2) that "a decision to reject the plea bargain would have been rational under the circumstances." Clarke, supra, quoting Padilla, supra at 1485. In this regard,
Clarke, supra at 47-48. With this requirement in mind, we turn to the record before us.
According to the defendant's affidavit submitted in support of his motion for new trial:
Although the defendant's affidavit is highly suggestive that he would have elected to go to trial but for his attorney's erroneous advice, we do not have the benefit of any findings or credibility assessments made by the motion judge. Without the benefit of such findings, it is not possible for us to say with any certainty whether the defendant's affidavit is merely self-serving or whether he was sufficiently prejudiced to justify vacating his guilty plea and ordering a new trial. See Saferian, supra at 96 ("whatever the attempted formulation of a standard in general terms, what is required in the actual process of decision of claims of ineffective assistance of counsel ... is a discerning examination and appraisal of the specific circumstances of the given case"). For this reason, we remand the case to the Boston Municipal Court with instructions to provide findings relating to the issue of prejudice and, if necessary, hold an additional evidentiary hearing on the defendant's motion for new trial for that purpose.
So ordered.
As it relates to the first prong, the United States Supreme Court has explained that "[t]he proper measure of attorney performance remains simply reasonableness under prevailing professional norms." Strickland, supra at 688. The Strickland test for ineffective assistance of counsel tracks the Massachusetts test, which asks (1) whether there has been "behavior of counsel falling measurably below that which might be expected from an ordinary fallible lawyer" and (2) "whether it has likely deprived the defendant of an otherwise available substantial ground of defence." Commonwealth v. Saferian, 366 Mass. 89, 96 (1974). We have held that satisfying the Saferian standard necessarily satisfies the Strickland standard. Commonwealth v. Fuller, 394 Mass. 251, 256 n.3 (1985).