204
Souter, J., dissenting
that a judge can never perceive a risk unless a lawyer points it out? Why excuse a judge's breach of judicial duty just because a lawyer has fallen down in his own ethics or is short on competence? Transforming the factually sufficient trigger of a formal objection into a legal necessity for responding to any breach of judicial duty is irrational.
Nor is that irrationality mitigated by the Government's effort to analogize the majority's objection requirement to the general rule that in the absence of plain error litigants get no relief from error without objection. The Government as amicus argues for making a formal objection crucial because judges are not the only ones obliged to take care for the integrity of the system; defendants and their counsel need inducements to help the courts with timely warnings. Brief for United States as Amicus Curiae 9, 26-27. The fallacy of the Government's argument, however, has been on the books since Wood was decided. See 450 U. S., at 265, n. 5 ("It is unlikely that [the lawyer on whom the conflict of interest charge focused] would concede that he had continued improperly to act as counsel"). The objection requirement works elsewhere because the objecting lawyer believes that he sights an error being committed by the judge or opposing counsel. See, e. g., United States v. Vonn, ante, at 72-73 (error in judge's Rule 11 plea colloquy). That is hardly the motive to depend on when the risk of error, if there is one, is being created by the lawyer himself in acting subject to a risk of conflict, 227 F. 3d 203, 213-217 (CA4 2000), vacated en banc, 240 F. 3d 348 (CA4 2001). The law on conflicted counsel has to face the fact that one of our leading cases arose after a trial in which counsel may well have kept silent about conflicts not out of obtuseness or inattention, but for the sake of deliberately favoring a third party's interest over the clients, and this very case comes to us with reason to suspect that Saunders suppressed his conflicts for the sake of a second fee in a case getting public attention. While the perceptive and conscientious lawyer (as in Holloway) needs
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