Lying To Make Friends

No amount of oil drilling news can ruin my good mood today, not when there are so many shockingly reasonable federal court decisions being announced. The first, Padilla v. Kentucky, finds that bad legal advice about the immigration consequences of a criminal guilty plea constitutes ineffective assistance of counsel. This is huge. As one immigrants’ rights advocate put it, “historic is not an understatement.” Many long-time legal permanent residents get deported after they get caught up in the legal system through criminal violations, especially drug crimes (even outrageously minor drug crimes).

These deportations do not fit the standard popular image of the deportee: a temporary worker, maybe, being returned to his home country, probably Mexico. Like Padilla himself, people deported following criminal convictions may be long-term residents in the U.S., with jobs, families, homes, and responsibilities here. In my experience working as a volunteer in an immigration detention center, I met one man who was facing deportation to Mexico even though he spoke almost no Spanish — he moved to the U.S. when he was very young, and only learned English in school.

Given the sympathetic nature of these cases, and the close association with traditional criminal law protections the Court has upheld, maybe it should not have been a huge surprise that this case was successful. (Notably, only famously nutty Scalia and Thomas dissented.) But what makes the decision even more exciting is the way it was decided (major props to my fave Justice Stevens), because Stevens’ majority decision frankly acknowledges what the Court has long denied – that deportation is a drastic punishment:

[A]s a matter of federal law, deportation is an integral part—indeed, sometimes the most important part—of the penalty that may be imposed on noncitizen defendants who plead guilty to specified crimes.

Later Stevens says that the severity of deportation, like banishment or exile, “underscores how critical it is for counsel to inform her noncitizen client that he faces a risk of deportation.” (The fact that Stevens used “her” when referring to the imagined lawyer only makes me love him the more.)

The other news, you ask? Judge Vaughn Walker (yes, that Judge Vaughn Walker) found the N.S.A.’s warrantless wiretapping program illegal. The government will now have to pay damages to the Islamic charity (and two of its lawyers, remarkably) it illegally surveilled in 2004. Hopefully the Justice Department will decide not to appeal the decision and waste more of our money defending these practices.

Also, Wonkette points out that almost all the oil drilling will be polluting the coasts of states that voted for McCain in 2008. Everybody wins today!

-AS