Massaro v. United States
The Court ruled that a criminal defendant does not lose the right to claim his trial lawyer was ineffective just because he failed to raise that claim on direct appeal. Such claims can still be brought later in a motion under 28 U.S.C. § 2255.
The decision rejects a stricter rule some appeals courts had used and instead lets defendants raise ineffective-assistance claims for the first time in the trial court, where evidence about the lawyer's decisions can actually be developed.
How it got here: After his conviction was affirmed on direct appeal, Massaro raised an ineffective-assistance claim in a § 2255 motion, which the district court and Second Circuit rejected as procedurally defaulted.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Joseph Massaro was tried and convicted of racketeering murder charges after prosecutors disclosed a key piece of evidence, a bullet, only after trial had begun; his trial lawyer twice turned down the judge's offer of a continuance to examine it. On direct appeal, new counsel challenged the evidence ruling but never argued that trial counsel had been ineffective in declining the continuance.
The question before the Court
Must a defendant raise a claim that his trial lawyer was ineffective on direct appeal, or can he wait and bring it later in a habeas motion?
The Court's answer
No — a defendant does not have to raise an ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claim on direct appeal to preserve it. The Court held that such claims may be brought for the first time in a motion under 28 U.S.C. § 2255, regardless of whether the defendant had new appellate counsel or whether the problem was visible from the trial record alone.
The Court reasoned that direct appeal is usually a poor forum for these claims because the trial record was never built to show why a lawyer made the choices he did or whether those choices caused harm. A collateral proceeding lets a defendant gather testimony and evidence, often before the same judge who presided at trial, making it the better venue in most cases.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Criminal defendants nationwide now have a clear, uniform path for raising claims that their trial lawyer botched the case: they can wait until after the direct appeal and bring the claim in a post-conviction motion, where they can present witnesses and evidence about their lawyer's decisions instead of being stuck with a bare appellate record.
What changes now
The case goes back to the lower courts so Massaro's ineffective-assistance claim about his trial lawyer's rejection of a continuance can be considered on the merits instead of being barred as procedurally defaulted. More broadly, this is a final ruling on how ineffective-assistance claims must be handled nationwide, resolving a split among the federal appeals courts in favor of allowing such claims to be raised for the first time in a § 2255 motion.
What this does not decide
The Court did not hold that ineffective-assistance claims must be saved for collateral review — a defendant may still raise the issue on direct appeal when the problem is obvious from the trial record, and questions about how such direct-appeal rulings affect a later § 2255 motion were left unresolved.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court started from the general procedural-default rule: claims not raised on direct appeal usually cannot be raised later unless the defendant shows cause for the omission and resulting prejudice. This rule exists to save judicial resources and protect the finality of convictions, not because it is required by any statute or constitutional provision.
- The Court asked whether applying that default rule to ineffective-assistance claims actually serves those two purposes, and concluded it does not, because forcing defendants to raise such claims on direct appeal would push them to argue before the facts needed to prove the claim exist.
- Under Strickland v. Washington, a defendant claiming ineffective assistance must show both that the lawyer's actions fell outside any reasonable strategy and that the failure caused real harm to the outcome. The Court explained that a trial record built to litigate guilt or innocence usually will not contain the facts needed to prove either part of that test.
- Because a district court hearing a later § 2255 motion can take testimony from the defendant, the prosecution, and the lawyer accused of deficient performance, and is often the same judge who watched the trial firsthand, the Court found this collateral setting better suited to resolving these claims than an appellate court working from a bare paper record.
- The Court also weighed the practical costs of the stricter rule used by the Second Circuit, including pressure on appellate lawyers to raise weak ineffective-assistance claims defensively and the burden on courts of sorting out which claims should have been raised earlier, and found these costs outweighed any speed benefits from resolving a few claims on direct appeal.
- Concluding that permitting ineffective-assistance claims to proceed in the first instance in a § 2255 motion better serves the goals behind the procedural-default doctrine, the Court adopted that approach as the correct rule.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Strickland v. Washington (466 U. S. 668)
The Court relies on Strickland's two-part test for proving a lawyer was constitutionally ineffective.