High Court Allows Court-Martial Challenge for Claim of Drunken Lawyer
The U.S. Supreme Court is giving a chance to a former serviceman seeking to set aside his guilty plea in a court martial based on allegations his lawyer was drunk during the proceedings.
The serviceman, Jacob Denedo, was given a bad conduct discharge from the Navy in 2000 after he pleaded guilty to larceny in an alleged scheme to defraud a community college, the Associated Press reports. Denedo, a permanent U.S. resident who was born in Nigeria, said he agreed to the plea on the basis of his lawyer’s assurance he could not be deported—an assurance that turned out to be wrong.
Denedo said he later found out his lawyer was an alcoholic who was not sober during the court-martial proceedings. The government had contended military courts had no jurisdiction to re-examine the conviction because Denedo is no longer in the Navy.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in his majority decision (PDF) that military courts have jurisdiction to entertain coram nobis petitions “to re-examine judgments in rare cases where a fundamental flaw is alleged and other judicial processes for correction are unavailable.”
“Our holding allows military courts to protect the integrity of their dispositions and processes by granting relief from final judgments in extraordinary cases when it is shown that there were fundamental flaws in the proceedings leading to their issuance,” Kennedy wrote.
Four partially dissenting justices disagreed that military courts may issue coram nobis writs.
The case is United States v. Denedo.
