508
Opinion of the Court
impose in many other cases, where a district court on collateral review would be forced to conduct the cause-andprejudice analysis before turning to the merits. The Second Circuit's rule, moreover, does not produce the benefits of other rules requiring claims to be raised at the earliest opportunity—such as the contemporaneous objection rule— because here, raising the claim on direct appeal does not permit the trial court to avoid the potential error in the first place.
A growing majority of state courts now follow the rule we adopt today. For example, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania recently changed its position to hold that "a claim raising trial counsel ineffectiveness will no longer be considered waived because new counsel on direct appeal did not raise a claim related to prior counsel's ineffectiveness." Commonwealth v. Grant, 572 Pa. 48, 67, 813 A. 2d 726, 738 (2002); see also id., at 62-67, and n. 13, 813 A. 2d, at 735-738, and n. 13 (cataloging other States' case law adopting this position).
Although the Government now urges us to adopt the rule of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, the Government took the opposite approach in some previous cases, arguing not only that claims of ineffective assistance of counsel could be brought in the first instance in a motion under § 2255, but that they must be brought in such a motion proceeding and not on direct appeal. See, e. g., United States v. Cronic, 466 U. S. 648, 667, n. 42 (1984). We do not go this far. We do not hold that ineffective-assistance claims must be reserved for collateral review. There may be cases in which trial counsel's ineffectiveness is so apparent from the record that appellate counsel will consider it advisable to raise the issue on direct appeal. There may be instances, too, when obvious deficiencies in representation will be addressed by an appellate court sua sponte. In those cases, certain questions may arise in subsequent proceedings under § 2255 concerning the conclusiveness of determinations made on the ineffective-assistance claims raised on direct ap-
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