A man on Alabama’s death row for 28 years won a new opportunity to show that his trial lawyer was ineffective on Monday, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that both the lawyer and the trial judge misunderstood a point of law fundamental to his case.
In an unsigned, unanimous opinion, the justices ruled in Hinton v. Alabama that Alabama courts incorrectly applied the test for ineffective assistance of counsel that the high court established in Strickland v. Washington (1984). Under that test, a defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel is violated if his trial attorney’s performance falls below an objective standard of reasonableness and the attorney’s deficient performance was prejudicial to the trial’s outcome.
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