Whether a defendant on direct appeal should receive a remand for an evidentiary hearing upon showing a colorable Sixth Amendment ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claim

QUESTION PRESENTED __ The record below raises serious questions about whether Petitioner—an individual whose exposure to lead paint poisoning as a child has had a significant and harmful impact on his cognitive abilities—received the effective assistance of counsel that he is guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment. Among other problems, the record indicates that Petitioner’s attorney failed to explain to Petitioner the terms of his plea agreement, leading Petitioner, who ended up with a sentence of 132 months im prison, to honestly but mistakenly believe that he instead had entered into a plea bargain for only 72 months in prison. Yet when by different counsel—raised that colorable inef. fective assistance of counsel claim on direct appeal and requested a remand to develop that claim through an evidentiary hearing, the Fourth Circuit rejected it out of hand, holding instead that Petitioner must wait to raise that colorable claim in a collateral proceeding. In doing so, the Fourth Circuit, like eight other circuits, declined to follow the lead of the First and D.C. Circuits, each of which authorizes defendants to raise colorable Sixth Amendment ineffectiveness claims on direct appeal, at which point they are remanded for evidentiary hearings. The question presented by this case is thus: If a federal defendant on direct appeal raises a colorable Sixth Amendment claim of ineffective assistance by his counsel in the district court, with support in the existing record on appeal, should the Court of Appeals remand the case to the district court to conduct an evidentiary hearing on i the claim rather than require the defendant to wait until a collateral proceeding to raise the claim? , | | | | . | | | ii