Cite as: 532 U. S. 374 (2001)
Opinion of the Court
in Custis are not present in the § 2255 context. Brief for Petitioner 22-26. We disagree. First, a district court evaluating a § 2255 motion is as unlikely as a district court engaged in sentencing to have the documents necessary to evaluate claims arising from long-past proceedings in a different jurisdiction. While petitioner is quite right that federal district courts are capable of evaluating fact-intensive constitutional claims raised by way of a habeas petition, id., at 22-23, institutional competence does not make decades-old state court records and transcripts any easier to locate.
The facts of this case only reinforce our concern. For example, petitioner contends that he entered his 1978 and 1981 guilty pleas without a full understanding of the essential elements of the crimes with which he was charged, and therefore the resulting convictions violated due process. App. 40-42, 50-51. These claims by their nature require close scrutiny of the record below. Yet petitioner has not placed the transcript from either plea colloquy in the record. In fact, he has admitted that the 1978 transcript is missing from the state court file. Cf. id., at 38, n. 3. Under these circumstances, it would be an almost futile exercise for a district court to attempt to determine accurately what was communicated to petitioner more than two decades ago.
With respect to the concern for finality, petitioner argues that because he has served the complete sentences for his 1978 and 1981 convictions, the State would suffer little, if any, prejudice if those convictions were invalidated through a collateral challenge under § 2255. Brief for Petitioner 24- 26. To the contrary, even after a defendant has served the full measure of his sentence, a State retains a strong interest in preserving the convictions it has obtained. States impose a wide range of disabilities on those who have been convicted of crimes, even after their release. For example, in California, where petitioner committed his crimes, persons convicted of a felony may be disqualified from holding public office, subjected to restrictions on professional licensing, and
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