Porter

MEMORANDUM **

The facts and procedural history need no recitation, being familiar to the parties. The question for our decision is whether the following acts or omissions of Craig J. Porter’s court-appointed lawyers rendered their assistance ineffective, requiring that his guilty pleas to tax and bankruptcy fraud be vacated: (1) Doug Stringer’s advice as to the consequences of a guilty plea; (2) John Ransom’s failure to move to withdraw Porter’s guilty pleas prior to sentence; (3) Ransom’s failure to obtain a ruling on his objection to a psychiatric report provided to the district court in the pre-sentence report; and (4) Ransom’s failure, on Porter’s appeal from sentence, to raise a handful of the foregoing errors.

The overarching principle governing this appeal in which counsel’s effectiveness is challenged is as follows:

Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 687 , 104 S.Ct. 2052, 2064 , 80 L.Ed.2d 674 (1984). Where, as here, the Strickland formulation is applied to counsel’s effectiveness with respect to a plea agreement its second element

focuses on whether counsel’s constitutionally ineffective performance affected the outcome of the plea process. In other words, in…