consequences of conviction

The ABA Standards require defense lawyers to consider collateral consequences of conviction.

The collateral consequences of criminal conviction are not the same as the social consequences of conviction.

After Padilla, there has been significant litigation in the lower courts about whether attorneys are required to advise their criminal clients about other consequences of convictions.

Margaret Colgate Love & Gabriel J. Chin, Padilla v. Kentucky: The Right to Counsel and the Collateral Consequences of Conviction, The Champion, May 2010.

Traditionally, defense attorneys were only required to advise their clients of the direct consequences of convictions: the sentence likely to result from a plea bargain, the maximum sentence one might face at trial, and the risk of conviction at trial.

However, 15 months later when it came to court, Whitehouse's barrister dramatically abandoned the prosecution, saying in court: "The consequences of conviction - irrespective of penalty - would greatly damage Mr Bogdanov in his personal and professional life."

The collateral consequences of conviction linger long after the sentence imposed by the court has been served, disqualifying convicted people from many jobs and public benefits, discouraging rehabilitation and helping to create a class of people who live permanently at the margins of the law.

And while the penalty imposed on petitioners in this case was relatively minor, the consequences of conviction are not . . . In Bowers, we held that a state law criminalizing sodomy as applied to homosexual couples did not violate substantive due process.

Below we include a brief extract from this study which looks at the problems and consequences of conviction for the business, 'respectable' criminal in comparison to the regular criminal - bearing in mind, of course, that the business criminal is far less likely to be convicted that most other types of criminal.

"Impairment of any other litigating capacity is simply one of the incidental (and perfectly constitutional) consequences of conviction and incarceration," Justice Scalia said, adding that Bounds v. Smith "does not guarantee inmates the wherewithal to transform themselves into litigating engines capable of filing everything from shareholder derivative actions to slip-and-fall claims."