Illinois Ct of Appeals again reverses conviction because of ineffective assistance of counsel

Last week, I reported that the Illinois Court of Appeals recently announced two opinions in which it reversed convictions based on the deficient conduct of the defendants' attorneys. Surprinsingly, the court has reversed a third conviction in an opinion released today. The case is called People v. Sánchez and it is available here.

In this case, the court concluded that the defendant's attorney had failed to investigate the details of the defendant's prior conviction or that counsel was unaware of the law (which clearly holds that the prior conviction was inadmissible). The defendant's lawyer did not object to the admissibility of the conviction which the court found to support a finding of ineffective assistance of counsel. The court acknowledged that the decision whether to object is generally a matter of trial strategy, but it concluded that there was no valid strategic reason for trial counsel's failure to object to the admission of the defendant's prior conviction.