30
Opinion of the Court
887 (1983); Johnson, supra, it has long been applied equally to other forms of collateral attack, see, e. g., Voorhees v. Jackson, 10 Pet. 449, 472 (1836) (observing, in a collateral challenge to a court-ordered sale of property in an ejectment action, that "[t]here is no principle of law better settled, than that every act of a court of competent jurisdiction shall be presumed to have been rightly done, till the contrary appears"). Respondent, by definition, collaterally attacked his previous convictions; he sought to deprive them of their normal force and effect in a proceeding that had an independent purpose other than to overturn the prior judgments. See Black's Law Dictionary 261 (6th ed. 1990); see also Lewis v. United States, 445 U. S. 55, 58, 65 (1980) (challenge to un-counseled prior conviction used as predicate for subsequent conviction characterized as "collateral").
There is no good reason to suspend the presumption of regularity here. This is not a case in which an extant transcript is suspiciously "silent" on the question whether the defendant waived constitutional rights. Evidently, no transcripts or other records of the earlier plea colloquies exist at all. Transcripts of guilty plea proceedings are normally made in Kentucky only if a direct appeal is taken or upon the trial judge's specific direction, Tr. of Oral Arg. 13-14, and the stenographer's notes and any tapes made of the proceedings normally are not preserved more than five years, id., at 16-17. The circumstance of a missing or nonexistent record is, we suspect, not atypical, particularly when the prior conviction is several years old. But Boykin colloquies have been required for nearly a quarter century. On collateral review, we think it defies logic to presume from the mere unavailability of a transcript (assuming no allegation that the unavailability is due to governmental misconduct) that the defendant was not advised of his rights. In this situation, Boykin does not prohibit a state court from presuming, at least initially, that a final judgment of conviction offered for purposes of sentence enhancement was validly obtained.
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