496
Opinion of the Court
his 1953 bank robbery trial of his three previous felony convictions. This Court sustained his challenge insofar as his sentence was concerned, saying "Gideon . . . established an unequivocal rule 'making it unconstitutional to try a person for a felony in a state court unless he had a lawyer or had validly waived one.' " Id., at 449, quoting Burgett v. Texas, supra, at 114. The Court held that "[e]rosion of the Gideon principle can be prevented here only by affirming the judgment of the Court of Appeals remanding this case to the trial court for reconsideration of the [defendant's] sentence." 404 U. S., at 449.
Custis invites us to extend the right to attack collaterally
prior convictions used for sentence enhancement beyond the right to have appointed counsel established in Gideon. We decline to do so. We think that since the decision in Johnson v. Zerbst more than half a century ago, and running through our decisions in Burgett and Tucker, there has been a theme that failure to appoint counsel for an indigent defendant was a unique constitutional defect. Custis attacks his previous convictions claiming the denial of the effective assistance of counsel, that his guilty plea was not knowing and intelligent, and that he had not been adequately advised of his rights in opting for a "stipulated facts" trial. None of these alleged constitutional violations rises to the level of a jurisdictional defect resulting from the failure to appoint counsel at all. Johnson v. Zerbst, supra.
Ease of administration also supports the distinction. As revealed in a number of the cases cited in this opinion, failure to appoint counsel at all will generally appear from the judgment roll itself, or from an accompanying minute order. But determination of claims of ineffective assistance of counsel, and failure to assure that a guilty plea was voluntary, would require sentencing courts to rummage through frequently nonexistent or difficult to obtain state-court transcripts or records that may date from another era, and may come from any one of the 50 States.
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