Anderson v. U.S.

Dist. Ct. erred in denying without evidentiary hearing defendant’s habeas petition that challenged his guilty plea to drug conspiracy charges that concerned death of individual who bought heroin from defendant, where defendant alleged that his trial counsel was ineffective for failing to investigate factual and legal bases of applying death results enhancement to his 223-month sentence, where record showed that buyer had also ingested heroin from different source on same day of his death. Defendant alleged sufficient facts to support his claim of ineffective assistance of counsel, where evidence did not clearly show that defendant’s heroin was but-for cause of buyer’s death, and where trial counsel admitted that she never discussed buyer’s toxicology results with anyone trained in toxicology, and that she herself was not trained to interpret toxicology results. As such, defendant was entitled to evidentiary hearing to determine what advice counsel gave to him about buyer’s cause of death and about significance of death results enhancement to enable defendant to make informed decision whether to hire toxicology expert, let alone to plead guilty. Defendant also showed prejudice arising out of counsel’s deficient performance, where he showed reasonable probability that he would have rejected guilty plea in favor of taking case to trial since, without death results enhancement, defendant would have faced similar sentencing consequences as set forth in guilty plea, such that defendant could have decided he had little to lose by going to trial.