372
Opinion of the Court
Ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claims will be raised only in those cases where a defendant has been found guilty of the offense charged, and from the perspective of hindsight there is a natural tendency to speculate as to whether a different trial strategy might have been more successful. We adopted the rule of contemporary assessment of counsel's conduct because a more rigid requirement "could dampen the ardor and impair the independence of defense counsel, discourage the acceptance of assigned cases, and undermine the trust between attorney and client." Ibid. But the "prejudice" component of the Strickland test does not implicate these concerns. It focuses on the question whether counsel's deficient performance renders the result of the trial unreliable or the proceeding fundamentally unfair. Id., at 687; see Kimmelman, 477 U. S., at 393 (Powell, J., concurring). Unreliability or unfairness does not result if the ineffectiveness of counsel does not deprive the defendant of any substantive or procedural right to which the law entitles him. As we have noted, it was the premise of our grant in this case that Perry was correctly decided, i. e., that respondent was not entitled to an objection based on "double counting." Respondent therefore suffered no prejudice from his counsel's deficient performance.
The dissent contends that this holding is inconsistent with the retroactivity rule announced in Teague v. Lane, 489 U. S. 288, 310 (1989), but we think otherwise. Teague stands for the proposition that new constitutional rules of criminal procedure will not be announced or applied on collateral review. Id., at 310. As the dissent acknowledges, post, at 387, this retroactivity rule was motivated by a respect for the States' strong interest in the finality of criminal convictions, and the recognition that a State should not be penalized for relying on "the constitutional standards that prevailed at the time the original proceedings took place." Teague, supra, at 306 (plurality opinion) (internal citations omitted). "The 'new rule' principle therefore validates reasonable, good-faith in-
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