U. S. SUPREME COURT RULES "PADILLA" IMMIGRATION CASE NOT RETROACTIVE; "REBUTTABLE PRESUMPTION" ATTACHES TO STATE COURT RULING ON ISSUES PRESENTED TO IT.

Supreme Court Limits Reach of 2010 Ruling on Deportation Warning
By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that criminal defense lawyers must warn their clients if deportation could be a consequence of a guilty plea. On Wednesday, the court limited the reach of that ruling, saying it did not apply retroactively to people whose convictions had become final by the time the justices announced their 2010 decision, Padilla v. Kentucky.

Wednesday’s decision was bad news for the petitioner, Roselva Chaidez, a Mexican woman in Chicago who has been a legal permanent resident of the United States since 1977. In 2003, she was accused of participating in an insurance fraud by falsely claiming to have been a passenger in a car involved in an accident.

She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four years of probation. The conviction came to light in 2009 when she applied for citizenship and was told she would be deported because of it. Based on the Padilla decision, a federal judge in Illinois set aside her conviction.

Justice Elena Kagan, writing for herself and six other justices, said the federal judge’s ruling was at odds with the Supreme Court’s central precedent concerning retroactivity, its 1989 decision in Teague v. Lane. The Teague decision said that a ruling is retroactive if it applies existing precedent, but not if it announces a new legal principle. New rules count only from when they are announced.

Justice Kagan said Padilla broke new ground and so was of no help to Ms. Chaidez. There was evidence for Padilla’s novelty, Justice Kagan wrote, in the case itself. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in a concurrence in Padilla, said the majority’s approach was a “dramatic departure from precedent.” In a dissent in the case, Justice Antonin Scalia said that “until today” lawyers were required to give advice only about the criminal prosecution itself and not about other consequences of conviction like deportation.

Justice Clarence Thomas, in a separate opinion on Wednesday, said he continued to believe that “Padilla was wrongly decided” and so would have ruled against Ms. Chaidez whether she received bad legal advice before or after 2010.

In a dissent in the case, Chaidez v. United States, No. 11-820, Justice Sonia Sotomayor disputed the majority’s retroactivity analysis, saying it failed “to account for the development of professional standards over time.”

In a second decision issued Wednesday, Johnson v. Williams, No. 11-465, the court ruled that there is “a strong but rebuttable presumption” that a state court has actually ruled on all of the issues before the court even if its decision did not specifically address each of them. The question matters under a 1996 federal law that limits federal court review of state convictions where an argument has been “adjudicated on the merits” by a state court.

In 2011 in Harrington v. Richter, the Supreme Court ruled that a state court decision was “on the merits” even though it offered no reasoning at all. The question in Wednesday’s decision, Johnson v. Williams, No. 11-465, was what to do about a decision that addressed one argument but said nothing about another.

Justice Alito wrote the majority opinion, joined by seven other justices, leaving open one possible line of attack. “If a federal claim is rejected as a result of sheer inadvertence,” he wrote, “it has not been evaluated based on the intrinsic right and wrong of the matter.”

Justice Scalia voted with the majority but objected to the possibility of litigation over whether an argument had been “inadvertently overlooked” as a “newly-sponsored enterprise of probing the judicial mind.”