For years, experts have blamed Strickland v. Washington’s lax standard for assessing trial attorney effectiveness for many of the criminal justice system’s problems. But the conventional understanding of Strickland as a problem for ineffectiveness claims gives the decision too much prominence because it treats Strickland as the test for all such claims. That is a mistake. Properly understood, the Supreme Court has recognized four different constitutional forms of trial attorney ineffectiveness, and Strickland’s two-pronged test applies to only one of the four. If litigants and courts would notice this complexity and relegate Strickland to its proper place, it would pave the way for meritorious ineffectiveness claims of the other three kinds. This Article disaggregates strands of Sixth Amendment doctrine that others have jumbled together to enable courts and litigants to confine Strickland to its proper domain and use more appropriate analyses elsewhere.

The Article also explains why additional disaggregation is necessary within the category of cases where Strickland rightly applies. Implicitly, the Supreme Court has created not one but three tests for assessing deficient performance within that domain, and it has indicated a willingness to soften the outcome-determinative prejudice prong as well. Failure to recognize these different forms of Strickland ineffectiveness has made the test seem much harder for defendants to satisfy than needs to be true. Recognizing these complexities, and applying the right test in the right case, is necessary if individual defendants are to be treated fairly and systemic constitutional problems in the provision of indigent defense services are to be addressed.

* Yale Kamisar Collegiate Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School. Many thanks to Stephen Bright, Andrew Crespo, Donald Dripps, Brandon Garrett, Carissa Byrne Hessick, Jerold Israel, Kate Levine, Paul Marcus, Justin Murray, Anna Roberts, and workshop participants at St. John’s University School of Law for helpful comments. I am indebted to Brenna Twohy for her excellent research and Chelsea Rinnig for her proofreading and citation assistance. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the generous support of the William W. Cook Endowment at the University of Michigan Law School.