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A seventy-two-year-old woman was the victim of a late-night home invasion, and police quickly suspected William Allen Uptain, a nearby resident already in custody on alleged drug charges. Without giving Miranda warnings, an officer questioned Mr. Uptain in the jail’s booking area, during which Mr. Uptain confessed; only afterward was Mr. Uptain read his rights, at which point Mr. Uptain repeated the confession. At trial, Mr. Uptain’s lawyer failed to move to suppress these statements, even though they were the only evidence linking him to the crime. On appeal, the Court of Appeals found counsel’s failure to move to suppress his confessions constituted ineffective assistance, vacated Mr. Uptain’s convictions, and remanded the case. The State appealed to the Utah Supreme Court.

The State argues that the trial record does not contain all the facts needed to assess counsel’s decision not to file a suppression motion. The State reasons that the trial record does not conclusively establish that the police violated Mr. Uptain’s Miranda rights in extracting his confession, that it’s therefore unclear whether a motion to suppress Mr. Uptain’s confession would have succeeded, and that Mr. Uptain therefore could not prove ineffective assistance of counsel without supplementing the record with additional evidence ruling out the possibility that his trial lawyer had a reasonable basis for deciding against moving to suppress Mr. Uptain’s confession. The SSCI and the ºìÐÓÊÓƵ of Utah filed an amicus brief arguing that the State’s argument misapprehends what must be shown to demonstrate ineffective assistance of counsel and that requiring him to provide more evidence would create unnecessary hurdles and waste judicial and litigant resources. The ºìÐÓÊÓƵ brief emphasizes that, when a confession is the only evidence against a criminal defendant, a defendant seeking to establish ineffective assistance of counsel should not have to prove that a motion to suppress the confession necessarily would have been granted if his defense lawyer had filed one. Instead, it is sufficient to for the defendant to show that the motion, if filed, could have been successful and, if granted, would have had a reasonable probability of changing the outcome of the trial.