Whether the Kentucky Court of Appeals has diminished and violated the federal constitutional guarantee of effective assistance of counsel in the pretrial negotiation phase of a criminal trial mandated by Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668 (1984), Hill v. Lockhart, 474 U.S. 52 (1985), Padilla v. Kentucky, 130 S. Ct. 1473 (2010), Lafler v. Cooper, 132 S. Ct. 1376 (2012), and Missouri v. Frye, 132 S. Ct. 1399 (2012), by sanctioning as effective assistance of counsel the conduct of a criminal defense attorney who admittedly was ignorant of and failed to advise his client of the sentencing aspects of the case and instead relied upon the client to read criminal statutes and a generic sentencing form provided by counsel and who deliberately declined to seek clarification from the prosecution of the one-sentence oral plea offer counsel admittedly did not understand or believe would be acceptable to the court before simply conveying the one-sentence offer to his client with no explanation and no advice.

Whether the Kentucky Court of Appeals misinterpreted and misapplied the prejudice standard of Lafler v. Cooper, 132 S. Ct. 1376 (2012), by finding Petitioner failed to demonstrate how Petitioner's trial counsel's performance impacted Petitioner's decision to reject the plea offer, even though Petitioner showed that but for the ineffective advice of counsel there is a reasonable probability that the plea offer would have been presented to the court, as Petitioner testified he would have accepted the plea, the prosecution acknowledged the offer would not have been withdrawn in light of intervening circumstances, the trial court would have accepted its terms, and that the conviction or sentence, or both, under the plea offer's terms would have been substantially less severe than the conviction and sentence actually imposed following Petitioner's jury trial.

Whether the Kentucky Court of Appeals has diminished and violated the federal constitutional guarantee of effective assistance of counsel