Perhaps the single most frequent cause of wrongful convictions occurs when a client’s trial attorney fails to provide effective assistance of counsel as guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Sometimes the failure is inadvertent, or due to a lack of resources, but other times it can result in the complete breakdown of the adversarial process. Find out why this happens, and why it is so difficult to obtain relief once a person is convicted after trial counsel performs deficiently.
Speaker: Cliff Gardner, Appellate Attorney, Law Offices of Cliff Gardner. Cliff has had a post-conviction practice for the last 30 years, specializing in criminal appellate and habeas corpus representation in state and federal court. He has argued cases at all levels of the state and federal court system, including more than a dozen cases in the California Supreme Court, three cases before en banc panels of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and three cases in the United States Supreme Court. Cliff has also successfully represented death row clients in Idaho, Montana, and California, and lectured and written about appellate and habeas representation generally as well as the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act passed by Congress in 1996. In 2000, he co-authored a statewide initiative — the “Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act of 2000” (more commonly known as Proposition 36) — which was enacted by 61% of the electorate on November 7, 2000. In 2005, he wrote the Santa Cruz City Ordinance No. 2005-28 creating a compassionate use program to ensure that critically ill citizens of Santa Cruz County had access to medical marijuana.