Cite as: 535 U. S. 55 (2002)
Opinion of the Court
violation, he pleaded guilty and was later sentenced at a hearing in which his lawyer repeatedly represented that McCarthy had been guilty of nothing but sloppiness.8 The contradiction between the plea and the denial of the mental state alleged bespoke the prejudice of an unknowing plea, to which the judge's indifference was an affront to the integrity of the judicial system. While we need not religitate or rewrite McCarthy at this point, it is safe to say that the actual opinion is not even speculative authority that the plain-error rule stops short of Rule 11 errors.
Nor is there any persuasive reason to think that when the Advisory Committee and Congress later came to consider Rule 11(h) they accepted the view Vonn erroneously attributes to this Court in McCarthy. The attention of the Advisory Committee to the problem of Rule 11 error was not drawn by McCarthy so much as by events that subsequently invested that case with a significance beyond its holding. In 1975, a few years after McCarthy came down, Congress transformed Rule 11 into a detailed formula for testing a defendant's readiness to proceed to enter a plea of guilty, obliging the judge to give specified advice about the charge, the applicable criminal statute, and even collateral law. The Court in McCarthy had, for example, been content to say that a defendant would need to know of the right against self-incrimination and rights to jury trial and confrontation before he could knowingly plead. But the 1975 revision of Rule 11 required instruction on such further matters as cross-examination in addition to confrontation, see Fed. Rule Crim. Proc. 11(c)(3); the right to counsel "at . . . trial" even when the defendant stood in court with a lawyer next to him (as in this case), see ibid.; and even the consequences of any
8 Nor did McCarthy claim that the guilty plea should be accepted on the Alford theory that a defendant may plead guilty while protesting innocence when he makes a conscious choice to plead simply to avoid the expenses or vicissitudes of trial. North Carolina v. Alford, 400 U. S. 25 (1970).
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