Matt Daher authored From Bad Lawyering To Long Sentencing: How Ineffective Assistance of Counsel at Sentencing Can Impact Appeal Options — an article written for Texas inmates and their families that explains in plain language when an attorney's failures at sentencing rise to a constitutional violation, and what an inmate can do about it after the fact.
Why This Article Exists
Sentencing is one of the most misunderstood corners of Texas post-conviction practice. Most resources written for inmates and families focus on guilt-stage challenges: sufficiency of the evidence, suppression issues, jury selection. The lawyering that happens at sentencing — where most Texas sentences are actually decided — gets far less attention. Yet the gap between competent and inadequate representation does some of its most lasting damage at exactly that stage. A missing mitigation expert, an uncorrected enhancement paragraph, or a plea offer that was never properly explained can add years or decades to a Texas sentence. Texas law provides a remedy for those failures, but only if the inmate knows the remedy exists, knows how to raise it, and acts before the procedural deadlines run.
What the Article Covers
- The Strickland framework. The two-part federal test that governs every ineffective-assistance claim, why it was built for sentencing from the start, and why "reasonable probability" is a more forgiving standard than it first sounds.
- What sentencing mistakes actually look like in Texas. Failures to investigate or present mitigation evidence at the punishment phase; failures to correct inaccurate criminal-history information used to enhance punishment; failures to call defense experts; failures to advise on parole, the punishment range, or the stacking of consecutive sentences; and plea-stage mistakes governed by Lafler v. Cooper and Missouri v. Frye.
- Capital cases. A focused discussion of the Supreme Court's mitigation-investigation cases (Wiggins v. Smith, Rompilla v. Beard, and the 2020 Texas case Andrus v. Texas).
- The three options for raising the claim. Direct appeal (and why it is rarely the right vehicle after Thompson v. State); state habeas under Article 11.07 (noncapital) and Article 11.071 (capital); and federal habeas under 28 U.S.C. § 2254, with its one-year deadline and "doubly deferential" standard of review.
- Practical guidance for families. What the strongest claims have in common, what records to start gathering now, and why timing matters.
The article is not a substitute for legal advice, but it is a clear-eyed map of the legal terrain so that families can ask the right questions and act before deadlines run.
If you or a loved one believes a Texas conviction or sentence was the product of ineffective representation, contact Daher Law Group.