Orsborn, Warden v. Long

Patricia Warrington Long pleaded guilty in 2023 to vehicular homicide and other charges after striking and killing an elderly pedestrian while intoxicated and fleeing the scene. Years later she filed a habeas corpus petition (a challenge to the legality of her imprisonment) in Hart County, claiming her court-appointed plea lawyer was constitutionally ineffective because he never told her she could withdraw her plea within the court term and never gave her copies of body camera footage and medical records that might have supported defenses about the victim's location and cause of death. The habeas court agreed and ordered a new trial. The Supreme Court of Georgia reversed. It found that even assuming her lawyer's performance was deficient, Long never proved she would have rejected the plea and gone to trial instead, especially since she was already aware of the key facts from statements made openly at her plea hearing and offered no real evidence that a trial would have gone better for her.

To overturn a guilty plea for ineffective assistance of counsel, a defendant must show a reasonable probability that, but for counsel's errors, she would not have pleaded guilty and would have insisted on going to trial; because Long presented no such proof, her claim fails regardless of whether her lawyer's performance was deficient.

The ruling reinstates Long's convictions and sentence, meaning she will not get a new trial. It also reminds Georgia defendants and their lawyers that overturning a guilty plea requires concrete proof the person would have chosen trial, not just claims made after sentencing.

Judgment reversed

1. The court applied the two-part Strickland test, which requires a defendant to show both that her lawyer's performance was deficient and that the deficiency caused her harm, and noted that in guilty plea cases the harm requirement means showing a reasonable probability she would have rejected the plea and gone to trial.
2. On appeal from a habeas ruling, the Supreme Court of Georgia accepts the habeas court's factual findings unless clearly wrong but independently decides, without deference, whether the lawyer's performance was deficient and whether it caused harm.
3. The court found that Long was present at her plea hearing when the prosecution and her own lawyer openly discussed the victim's location at the time of the crash and her death from a stroke, so Long already knew the very information she claimed was hidden from her in the unreviewed medical records and body camera footage.
4. Because courts should rely on evidence from the time of the plea rather than a defendant's after-the-fact claims about what she would have done, and Long never introduced the doctor's report or otherwise proved a trial would have gone better for her, she failed to show she would have chosen trial over pleading guilty.
5. On the separate claim that her lawyer never told her she could move to withdraw her plea within the court term, the court found no evidence at all that she would have withdrawn the plea and gone to trial if told of that right, since Long did not even address the issue at her habeas hearing.

• ineffective assistance of counsel
• guilty plea withdrawal
• vehicular homicide
• habeas corpus
• Strickland standard