Cite as: 506 U. S. 364 (1993)
Stevens, J., dissenting
The Court compounds its error by insisting that respondent make his newly required showing from the vantage point of hindsight. Hindsight has no place in a Sixth Amendment jurisprudence that focuses, quite rightly, on protecting the adversarial balance at trial. Respondent was denied "the assistance necessary to justify reliance on the outcome of the proceeding," Strickland v. Washington, 466 U. S., at 692, because his counsel's performance was so far below professional standards that it satisfied Strickland's first prong, and so severely lacking that the verdict "would reasonably likely have been different absent the errors," id., at 696, under the second prong. It is simply irrelevant that we can now say, with hindsight, that had counsel failed to make a double-counting objection four years after the fact, his performance would have been neither deficient nor prejudicial. For as it happened, counsel's failure to object came at a time when it signified a breakdown in the adversarial process. A post hoc vision of what would have been the case years later has no bearing on the force of this showing.
Not surprisingly, the Court's reliance on hindsight finds no support in Strickland itself. Strickland makes clear that the merits of an ineffective-assistance claim must be "viewed as of the time of counsel's conduct." Id., at 690. As the Court notes, this point is stated explicitly with respect to Strickland's first prong, the quality of counsel's performance. Ante, at 371-372. What the Court ignores, however, is that the same point is implicit in Strickland's entire discussion of the second prong. By defining prejudice in terms of the effect of counsel's errors on the outcome of the proceedings,
prejudice. Simply put, an attorney's failure to make a Fourth Amendment objection will not alter the outcome of a proceeding if the objection is meritless, and hence would not be sustained. Nothing in Kimmelman suggests that failure to make an objection supported by current precedent, and hence likely to be sustained, would amount to anything less than ineffective assistance.
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