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Civil appellate, criminal appellate, and criminal trial lawyer at 704 North Thompson Street, #157, Conroe, Texas 77301-2578, (936) 494-1393.

Friday, April 27, 2012

Defendant Not Told Emphatically of the Danger of Bad Immigration Consequences Reversed

Alien takes deferred adjudication for assault family violence and violation of a protective order, gets adjudicated, gets processed for removal after his sentence is over. Alien says that he never would have pleaded guilty or no contest if he had known the plea was going to get him deported, and files habeas. Trial counsel says that he did not recall if he had advised the alien about the immigration consequences of his plea and that it was not his usual practice to do so. The plea paperwork warns that a plea may lead to removal, etc. Trial court refused habeas. Texas's First Court of Appeals in Houston held on that record that the alien's plea was involuntary and granted the relief.
The alien filed one habeas petition for each conviction; the opinions as to each are identical. The style of the case is Enyong v. State, Nos. 01-11-00943-CR and 01-11-00944-CR, (Tex. App.--Houston [1st Dist.] Apr. 26, 2012) (orig. proceedings).
The court seemed to feel bound by a prior opinion of theirs: Ex parte Tanklevskaya, No. 01-10-00627-CR, (Tex. App.--Houston [1st Dist.] 2011) (orig. proceeding), otherwise, I don't think that they would have ruled that same way, after all, the admonitions of the plea give notice of the possibility of deportation, etc. The worst that can be said of the written notices are that instead of saying that bad immigration consequences are almost certain to come from taking the plea, it merely says that those consequences may come.

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