Byron White

“ Questions like these cannot be answered with certitude; yet a decision to plead guilty must necessarily rest upon counsel's answers, uncertain as they may be. Waiving trial entails the inherent risk that the good-faith evaluations of a reasonably competent attorney will turn out to be mistaken either as to the facts or as to what a court's judgment might be on given facts.
That a guilty plea must be intelligently made is not a requirement that all advice offered by the defendant's lawyer withstand retrospective examination in a post-conviction hearing. ”

“ As we have previously set out, a plea of guilty in a state court is not subject to collateral attack in a federal court on the ground that it was motivated by a coerced confession unless the defendant was incompetently advised by his attorney. For the respondents successfully to claim relief based on Jackson v. Denno, each must demonstrate gross error on the part of counsel when he recommended that the defendant plead guilty instead of going to trial and challenging the New York procedures for determining the admissibility of confessions. ”

“ The core of the Court of Appeals' holding is the proposition that if in a collateral proceeding a guilty plea is shown to have been triggered by a coerced confession-if there would have been no plea had there been no confession-the plea is vulnerable at least in cases coming from New York where the guilty plea was taken prior to Jackson v. ”

“ In Chambers the voluntariness of the confessions was properly considered by this Court both because the alleged coercion producing the confessions appeared to carry over to taint the guilty pleas and because the convictions were based on the confessions as well as the guilty pleas. ”