Cite as: 535 U. S. 55 (2002)
Opinion of Stevens, J.
has.7 Under the Court's approach, the Government bears the burden of establishing no harm only when the defendant objects to the district court's failure to inform him. In other words, the Government must show prejudice only when the defendant asks the judge to advise him of a right of which the Rule 11 colloquy assumes he is unaware. To see the implausibility of this, imagine what such an objection would sound like: "Your Honor, I object to your failure to inform me of my right to assistance of counsel if I proceed to trial."
Despite this implausible scenario, and to support the result that it reaches, the Court's analysis relies upon an image of a cunning defendant, who is fully knowledgeable of his rights, and who games the system by sitting silently as the district court, apparently less knowledgeable than the defendant, slips up in following the dictates of Rule 11. See, e. g., ante, at 63 ("[A] defendant loses nothing by failing to
7 The Court states that this is like any other application of the plain-error rule as it is applied to all trial errors. Ante, at 73 ("The plain-error rule, [Vonn] 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 . . ."). Unlike most rules that apply to a trial, however, the special purpose of the Rule 11 colloquy is to provide information to a defendant prior to accepting his plea. Given this purpose, it is inconceivable that Congress intended the same rules for review of noncompliance to apply. A parallel example from the self-representation context illustrates this point. Pursuant to Faretta v. California, 422 U. S. 806 (1975), a defendant who wishes to represent himself must "be made aware of the dangers and disadvantages of self-representation," id., at 835. Assume a defendant states that he wishes to proceed pro se, and the trial judge makes no attempt to warn the defendant of the dangers and disadvantages of self-representation. If the defendant makes no objection to the trial court's failure to warn, surely we would not impose a plain-error review standard upon this nonobjecting defendant. This is so because the assumption of Faretta's warning requirement is that the defendant is unaware of the dangers. It is illogical in this context, as in the Rule 11 context, to require the presumptively unknowing defendant to object to the court's failure to adequately inform. Congress' decision to apply the harmless-error standard to all Rule 11 errors surely reflects this logic.
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