Cite as: 511 U. S. 485 (1994)
Souter, J., dissenting
Supreme Court: Reconsidering the Reach of the Great Writ, 59 U. Colo. L. Rev. 167, 174 (1988). In reviving the "jurisdiction" theory, the Court skips over the very difficulty that led to its abandonment, of devising a standard to tell whether or not a flaw in the proceedings leading to a conviction counts as a "jurisdictional defect." "Once the concept of 'jurisdiction' is taken beyond the question of the court's competence to deal with the class of offenses charged and the person of the prisoner" (as it must be if the concept is to reach Gideon violations) "it becomes a less than luminous beacon." Bator, Finality in Criminal Law and Federal Habeas Corpus for State Prisoners, 76 Harv. L. Rev. 441, 470 (1963). Thus, if being denied appointed counsel is a "jurisdictional defect," why not being denied effective counsel (treated as an equivalent in Strickland)? If a conviction obtained in violation of the right to have appointed counsel suffers from a "jurisdictional defect" because the right's "purpose . . . is to protect an accused from conviction resulting from his own ignorance of his legal and constitutional rights," Johnson v. Zerbst, supra, at 465, how distinguish a conviction based on a guilty plea resulting from a defendant's own ignorance of his legal and constitutional rights? 6 It was precisely due to the futility of providing principled answers to these questions that more than 50 years ago, and a quarter of a century before Burgett and Tucker, "[t]he Court finally abandoned the kissing of the jurisdictional book." P. Bator, D. Meltzer, P. Mishkin, & D. Shapiro, Hart and Wechsler's The Federal Courts and the Federal System 1502 (3d ed. 1988). The Court nevertheless finds itself compelled to reembrace the concept of "jurisdic-6 Judge Friendly suggested that a convicting court lacks jurisdiction if "the criminal process itself has broken down [and] the defendant has not had the kind of trial the Constitution guarantees." Friendly, Is Innocence Irrelevant? Collateral Attack on Criminal Judgments, 38 U. Chi. L. Rev. 142, 151 (1970). Would not this definition easily cover the Strickland and Boykin claims Custis sought to raise at sentencing?
509
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