Cite as: 535 U. S. 55 (2002)
Opinion of the Court
But the incentive to think and act early when Rule 11 is at stake would prove less substantial if Vonn's position were law; a defendant could choose to say nothing about a judge's plain lapse under Rule 11 until the moment of taking a direct appeal, at which time the burden would always fall on the Government to prove harmlessness. A defendant could simply relax and wait to see if the sentence later struck him as satisfactory; if not, his Rule 11 silence would have left him with clear but uncorrected Rule 11 error to place on the Government's shoulders. This result might, perhaps, be sufferable if there were merit in Vonn's objection that applying the plain-error standard to a defendant who stays mum on Rule 11 error invites the judge to relax. The plain-error rule, he says, would discount the judge's duty to advise the defendant by obliging the defendant to advise the judge. But, rhetoric aside, that is always the point of the plain-error rule: the value of finality requires defense counsel to be on his toes, not just the judge, and the defendant who just sits there when a mistake can be fixed cannot just sit there when he speaks up later on.10
10 Contrary to Justice Stevens's suggestion, post, at 78-80 (opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part), there is nothing "perverse" about conditioning the Government's harmless-error burden on an objection when the judge commits Rule 11 error. A defendant's right to counsel on entering a guilty plea is expressly recognized in Rule 11(c)(2), and counsel is obliged to understand the Rule 11 requirements. It is fair to burden the defendant with his lawyer's obligation to do what is reasonably necessary to render the guilty plea effectual and to refrain from trifling with the court. It therefore makes sense to require counsel to call a Rule 11 failing to the court's attention. It is perfectly true that an uncounseled defendant may not, in fact, know enough to spot a Rule 11 error, but when a defendant chooses self-representation after a warning from the court of the perils this entails, see Faretta v. California, 422 U. S. 806, 835 (1975), Rule 11 silence is one of the perils he assumes. Any other approach is at odds with Congress's object in adopting Rule 11, recognized in McCarthy v. United States, 394 U. S. 459, 465 (1969), to combat defendants' "often frivolous" attacks on the validity of their guilty pleas, by aiding the district judge in determining whether the defendant's plea was knowing and
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