Antonio Lopez v. Charles Scully, Superintendent, Green Haven Correctional Facility

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that habeas petitioner’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel was violated due to attorney’s actual conflict of interest and was entitled to re-sentencing in state court with new counsel
• finding a conflict of interest between an attorney and his client when the client alleged that the attorney coerced him into pleading guilty
• sending case back to state court \solely for resentencing\ because of actual conflict of interest during sentencing
• presuming prejudice when arguing in favor of his client’s motion to withdraw his guilty plea would force the attorney to admit a serious ethical breach and subject him to liability for malpractice
• district court “correctly concluded that, given the charges of incompetence that Lopez had levelled against his attorney, there was a conflict in this attorney’s continued representation”
• “The term ‘plausible alternative defense strategy1 does not embrace all possible courses of action open to a defense attorney; it refers to those which a zealous advocate would reasonably pursue under the circumstances.”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).