Georgia high court extends Padilla to parole eligibility

May 14, 2015 CCRC Staff

The Supreme Court of Georgia has extended the doctrine of Padilla v. Kentucky to a failure to advise about parole eligibility. In Alexander v. State, decided on May 11, a defendant sentenced to a 15-year prison term for child molestation sought to set aside his guilty plea on grounds that his defense counsel had not warned him that, as a recidivist, he would not be eligible for parole. The Georgia high court agreed that this failure constituted deficient performance under the doctrine of Strickland v. Washington, overruling its 1999 precedent holding that the Sixth Amendment did not require a defense lawyer to advise a client about this “collateral consequence” of conviction. The Georgia court distinguished its 2010 post-Padilla decision declining to find a warning by the court necessary, finding a clear constitutional distinction between defense counsel’s Sixth Amendment obligation to advise a client considering a guilty plea and the court’s due process obligation to warn a defendant in the same situation.

At the same time, the court declined to approve a lower court’s earlier extension of Padilla to sex offender registration, reserving for another day the question whether this consequence is “a drastic measure” that is “intimately related” to the criminal case. Most of the post-Padilla decisions involving parole eligibility have rested on the dubious pre-Padilla erroneous advice exception to the collateral consequences rule, an exception that the Alexander court firmly rejected.