Legal Question in Constitutional Law in Pennsylvania
The 6th Amendment
Hello, I am a high school student and I am doing a project on the 6th amendment, specifically the right to assistance of counsel. Throughout my research I discovered that a defendant can claim that his counsel was ineffective if he can prove two conditions. 1. that the counsel was incompetant. and 2. that more sufficient counsel would have resulted in a different outcome. I do not understand the purpose of having two seperate conditions. They seem so interdependent, but since there are two, I assume there is a reason. What I was hoping you could direct me towards is an example of when a defendant could prove his counsel's incompetance, but that the outcome would not have been different, so his request for new counsel was denied. Thank you so much!
1 Answer from Attorneys
Re: The 6th Amendment
An interesting way of doing research.
Actually either element could be true and the other not true.
So there are 3 possibilities:
1) Element 1 is met but not element 2. In this case even though counsel may have been incompetent. There was no harm because even if he was competent the defendant would have been found guilty.,
2) Element 1 is not meet in this case element 2 doesn't matter. Counsel gave competent representation.
3) Both elements are met. Counsel was incompetent and if he hadn't been the outcome would have been different.
What the standard is that representation was not competent and that if the that lack of competence actually made a difference. You need both.
{John}
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