Whether a defendant must understand the elements of the charged offenses for a valid waiver of the Sixth Amendment right to trial counsel

QUESTIONS PRESENTED Petitioner, who lacked a high school diploma and who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (but was not taking her prescribed medication), purported to waive her Sixth Amendment right to trial counsel in a pretrial colloquy with the district judge conducted on Zoom. At the time of the colloquy, petitioner had not yet been arraigned on the complex tax fraud charges in the 18-page indictment, and there was no indication that she had discussed the charges with her court-appointed counsel except briefly at petitioner’s initial appearance nine months before. At that initial appearance, petitioner had expressed confusion about the charges when the magistrate judge had asked her whether she understood them. During petitioner’s subsequent waiver colloquy with the district judge, the district judge failed to inquire whether petitioner understood the elements of the charges; failed to assure that petitioner understood that the maximum “years” of penalties that she faced were years of imprisonment (as opposed to years of probation); and failed to inquire about petitioner’s education level and her mental health history (despite the fact that the magistrate judge had ordered a mental health assessment as a condition of petitioner’s release on bail and despite two bizarre pro se filings by petitioner by that point — one of which indicated that petitioner believed she faced civil rather than criminal charges). The questions presented are: I. Whether, for a waiver of the Sixth Amendment right to trial counsel to be effective, a defendant must understand the elements of the charged offenses — as part of the defendant’s understanding of the “nature of charges,” Von Moltke v. Gillies, 332 U.S. 708, 724 (1948) (plurality op.)); cf. Bradshaw v. Stumpf, 545 U.S. 175, 183 (2005) (“Where a defendant pleads guilty to a crime without having been informed of the crime’s elements, th[e] [due process] standard is not met and the plea is invalid.”) il Il. Whether a trial judge must provide unambiguous information about the maximum criminal penalties that a defendant faces upon conviction before accepting the defendant’s waiver of her right to trial counsel. III. Whether, when the record indicates that a criminal defendant has mental illness, a trial judge must make specific inquiries about the defendant’s mental health history before accepting the defendant’s waiver of her right to trial counsel. IV. Whether a trial judge must address the factors set forth in the plurality opinion in Von Moltke, supra, in a waiver colloquy in order for a defendant’s waiver of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel to be valid. ili