Trujillo v. State

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Appellant was convicted of attempted burglary. The following year, Appellant was honorably discharged from probation. More than a decade later, Appellant filed a petition for a writ of coram nobis seeking relief from the judgment of conviction because his trial counsel did not inform him of the immigration consequences of his plea. The State argued that the writ of coram nobis was abolished by statute. The district court construed Appellant's petition to be a post-conviction petition for a writ of habeas corpus and denied relief. At issue on appeal was whether the writ of coram nobis exists in Nevada. The Supreme Court affirmed the district court's decision to deny the petition, holding (1) the common-law writ of coram nobis is available in Nevada only for petitioners who are no longer in custody on the judgment being challenged and may be granted only to address errors of fact outside the record that were not known to the court entering the judgment, could not have been raised earlier, and affect the validity and regularity of the decision itself in that they would have precluded the judgment from being rendered; and (2) the ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claim raised by Appellant was not within that limited scope. View " Trujillo v. State" on Justia Law