Law Commons^™

Protecting The Right To Effective Assistance Of Capital Postconviction Counsel: The Scope Of The Constitutional Obligation To Monitor Counsel Performance, Celestine Richards Mcconville

Celestine Richards McConville

This article is an outgrowth of an idea developed by the author in a prior article, The Right to Effective Assistance of Capital Postconviction Counsel: Constitutional Implications of Statutory Grants of Capital Counsel, 2003 Wisconsin Law Review 31. The prior article argued that the government's decision to provide capital postconviction counsel triggers a due process-based obligation to make the right to counsel meaningful, which essentially means that the right to counsel must include the right to effective assistance of counsel. In the postconviction context, the effectiveness guarantee requires that the government must monitor counsel's performance to ensure, to the extent …