US Vs. Gonzalez-Lopez Case Study

Decent Essays
In the case of US vs. Gonzalez-Lopez lies many facts within the case. Some of the reliable facts is that a man named Cuauhtemoc Gonzalez-Lopez was charged with conspiracy to distribute more than 100 kilograms of marijuana. His family hired him an attorney by the name of John Fahle to represent him but Lopez had another person in mind. Lopez went ahead and hired attorney Joseph Low to represent him in the hopes of including him with Fahle or instead of. As time went on both attorneys represented Lopez but the Magistrate Judge only accepted Low’s provisional entry of appearance and allowed him to participate only if he immediately file a motion for admission pro hac vice. As the trial continued to run the Judge revoked the provisional acceptance …show more content…
The courts biggest issues were trying to decide whether a trial court’s erroneous deprivation of a criminal defendant’s choice of counsel entitles him to a reversal of his conviction and should proving the sixth Amendment right to proceed with the counsel of choice depend on whether the deprivation of that right also resulted in compromising a defendants’ right to a fair trial. The majority opinion did not apply the Strickland test because they felt that the defendant could not show or give any reason as to why he felt the counsel was ineffective and that the counsels performance was poorly presented and deficient and the defendant was prejudiced by it. What the Strickland test is actually intended for is that the government must contend that the defendant must at least demonstrate that his counsel of choice would have pursued a different strategy and would have created a :reasonable probability”. In court cases the course can be split into two structures; trial errors and structural errors. Most constitutional errors are trial errors that occur “during the presentation to the jury,” and courts have discretion in deciding whether these trial errors are harmless and warrant a new trial. Structural errors defy harmless-error analysis because they “affect the framework within which the trial proceeds. These two errors are important to this case

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