370
Opinion of the Court
would have been different but for counsel's error may grant the defendant a windfall to which the law does not entitle him. See Cronic, supra, at 658.
Our decision in Nix v. Whiteside, supra, makes this very point. The respondent in that case argued that he received ineffective assistance because his counsel refused to cooperate in presenting perjured testimony. Obviously, had the respondent presented false testimony to the jury, there might have been a reasonable probability that the jury would not have returned a verdict of guilty. Sheer outcome determination, however, was not sufficient to make out a claim under the Sixth Amendment. We held that "as a matter of law, counsel's conduct . . . cannot establish the prejudice required for relief under the second strand of the Strickland inquiry." 475 U. S., at 175. The touchstone of an ineffective-assistance claim is the fairness of the adversary proceeding, and "in judging prejudice and the likelihood of a different outcome, '[a] defendant has no entitlement to the luck of a lawless decisionmaker.' " Ibid. (quoting Strickland, supra, at 695); see also Nix v. Whiteside, supra, at 186-187 (Blackmun, J., concurring in judgment) ("To the extent that Whiteside's claim rests on the assertion that he would have been acquitted had he been able to testify falsely, Whiteside claims a right the law simply does not recognize. . . . Since Whiteside was deprived of neither a fair trial nor any of the specific constitutional rights designed to guarantee a fair trial, he has suffered no prejudice").3
3 The dissent's attempt to distinguish Nix v. Whiteside, 475 U. S. 157 (1986), is unpersuasive because it ignores the reasoning employed by the Court. In Nix, we did not reject the respondent's claim of prejudice because perjury is "perhaps a paradigmatic example" of lawlessness. Post, at 382-383. Rather, we held that the respondent could not show Strickland prejudice merely by demonstrating that the outcome would have been different but for counsel's behavior. Nix, supra, at 175-176. Contrary to the dissent's suggestion, this reasoning was not invoked to resolve the factual oddity of one case, but rather represents a straightforward application of the rule of law announced in Strickland. Nix, supra, at 175-176.
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