Strickland’s IAC standard and Brendan Dassey

When a defendant is convicted of a crime, his or her appellate lawyer will often attack the defendant’s trial counsel for ineffective assistance of counsel (IAC) in an attempt to win a new trial.  The applicable legal standard is (usually) found in Strickland v. Washington.  However, Strickland’s IAC standard is both too broad and too narrow.

Strickland is too broad in the sense that it’s often used to go after the defendant’s trial counsel not for his or her own conduct, decisions, and errors, but rather for failing to correct the trial judge’s errors or to properly monitor the prosecutor’s misconduct during trial.  In other words, it unfairly requires the defense lawyer to do three jobs in one.

But on the other hand, Strickland is too narrow, as the standard often fails to provide any remedy for true defense-lawyer ineffectiveness, such as failing to consult with the client, showing up to trial drunk, or even falling asleep in court (which, in fairness, could be due to being drunk).

The Left's Message to the Right: No Speech for You!

Most people I know and with whom I associate embrace free speech, even when they disagree with its message.  It’s a founding value on which the country is based.  People are free to verbally bash the president, praise socialism or communism, and basically say whatever they want with limited exceptions.  I would never dream of trying to shut down such speech, even when I think it’s nonsensical. 

Yet that’s not the view of the Left.  The Left loves to suppress speech that doesn’t conform precisely to today’s “woke” messaging, and they’re doing it in corporations, on sports teams, at universities, and, perhaps most alarmingly, even in government.  (And you might even be punished for someone else’s speech.)  Let’s take a look across our land to see what’s happening at a couple of colleges and in one west coast city.