Chaidez v. United States
The Supreme Court ruled that its 2010 decision in Padilla v. Kentucky - which required lawyers to warn noncitizen clients about deportation risks before a guilty plea - does not apply retroactively to convictions that were already final when Padilla was decided.
That means people like Roselva Chaidez, whose conviction became final years before Padilla, cannot use that ruling to challenge an old guilty plea, even though her lawyer never mentioned the deportation risk she now faces.
How it got here: A federal trial court vacated Chaidez's conviction under Padilla; the Seventh Circuit reversed, holding Padilla announced a new rule that could not apply retroactively; the Supreme Court took the case to resolve a split among courts.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Roselva Chaidez, a lawful permanent resident, pleaded guilty in 2003 to mail fraud after helping defraud an insurance company. Her attorney never told her the conviction would trigger mandatory deportation. Years later, after immigration officials began removal proceedings against her, she tried to undo her guilty plea, arguing her lawyer's silence about deportation violated her right to effective counsel.
The question before the Court
If a lawyer never warned a client pleading guilty about the risk of deportation, could someone whose conviction was already final use a later Supreme Court ruling on that duty to reopen her case?
The Court's answer
No — Padilla does not apply retroactively to convictions that were already final when it was decided, so Chaidez cannot benefit from it. The Court explained that under its retroactivity framework from Teague v. Lane, a decision only applies to old, final convictions if it was merely a straightforward application of an existing legal standard, not a genuinely new rule.
Padilla was a new rule because before deciding whether her lawyer's silence was unreasonable, the Court first had to decide a threshold question that had never been settled: whether the right to a competent lawyer even covered advice about deportation at all, since courts had long treated deportation as a mere "collateral" consequence outside the Sixth Amendment's reach. Because that threshold question was genuinely open and courts nationwide had answered it the opposite way, Padilla broke new ground rather than just applying settled law.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Thousands of noncitizens who pleaded guilty before 2010 without being warned about deportation cannot reopen their cases based on Padilla. Only people whose convictions were still on direct appeal when Padilla was decided, or who plead guilty after 2010, can rely on that ruling to challenge their attorney's failure to warn them about deportation.
What changes now
The ruling is final on the retroactivity question. Chaidez's conviction cannot be reopened based on Padilla, though the Court left open other avenues she did not properly raise, such as arguments that the retroactivity bar should not apply to federal convictions or to ineffective-assistance claims generally. Other noncitizens whose convictions became final before Padilla likewise cannot rely on it to challenge old guilty pleas.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether Padilla was correctly decided in the first place, nor whether Teague's retroactivity bar applies differently to federal convictions or to ineffective-assistance claims generally — arguments Chaidez raised too late for the Court to consider. It also did not revisit what other consequences of a conviction count as "collateral."
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Thomas
Justice Thomas agreed that Chaidez cannot benefit from Padilla, but for a different reason. He continues to believe Padilla itself was wrongly decided and that the Sixth Amendment never required lawyers to advise about deportation at all, either going forward or retroactively. He therefore saw no need for the Court's Teague retroactivity analysis and concurred only in the judgment.
Dissent — Justice Sotomayor
“That is wrong, because Padilla did nothing more than apply the existing rule of Strickland v. Washington, 466 U. S. 668 (1984), in a new setting”The dissent's central objection that Padilla merely applied settled law rather than creating something new.
Justice Sotomayor argued Padilla did nothing more than apply the existing Strickland standard to a new factual setting, the same way the Court had done in many prior cases, by surveying evolving professional norms that had come to require deportation advice. She contended the majority wrongly treated Padilla's rejection of the collateral-consequences distinction as creating new law, when Padilla actually found that distinction irrelevant rather than adopting it. She would have held Padilla retroactive.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court applied the retroactivity framework from Teague v. Lane, under which a person whose conviction is already final cannot benefit from a Supreme Court ruling on collateral review if that ruling announced a 'new rule' rather than simply applying an already-settled legal standard.
- A ruling counts as merely applying settled law, rather than creating a new rule, when it takes a general legal standard and applies it to a new set of facts within the range that standard was designed to cover — a category the Court said includes most applications of the Strickland test for whether a lawyer's assistance was constitutionally adequate.
- The Court found that Padilla did not simply apply the Strickland standard to new facts. Instead, Padilla first had to resolve an unsettled threshold question: whether the Sixth Amendment's right to a competent lawyer even covers advice about deportation, which many courts had treated as a 'collateral consequence' of a conviction lying entirely outside the lawyer's constitutional duties.
- Before Padilla, that threshold question had been left open by the Court's own precedent, and nearly every state and federal appellate court that had addressed it concluded the opposite of what Padilla held — that lawyers had no constitutional duty to mention deportation at all.
- Because the answer to that threshold question was not dictated by existing precedent and was not something all reasonable judges would have already accepted, the Court concluded that Padilla broke new legal ground rather than merely applying an established standard.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Limits Padilla v. Kentucky (559 U. S. 356)
Held that Padilla's Sixth Amendment deportation-advice rule does not apply to convictions that were already final.
Distinguishes Hill v. Lockhart (474 U. S. 52)
Noted Hill left open whether the Sixth Amendment covers advice about collateral consequences, contributing to Padilla's novelty.