Ineffective Assistance at Sentencing

By Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., and Christopher Zoukis, JD, MBA

Can you raise ineffective assistance at sentencing?

Yes. Ineffective assistance at sentencing is a §2255 claim, and its prejudice standard is materially easier than at trial. Under Glover v. United States, 531 U.S. 198 (2001), any additional prison time caused by counsel’s error is prejudice — there is no minimum number of months. You do not have to show the verdict would have changed.

Key takeaways on ineffective assistance at sentencing

• There is no de minimis rule. Glover v. United States, 531 U.S. 198, 203 (2001): “any amount of actual jail time has Sixth Amendment significance.” The Court struck down the Seventh Circuit’s requirement that the increase be “significant.”
• The boundary is everything. A freestanding claim that the court misapplied the Guidelines is generally not cognizable under §2255. The same error, pleaded as counsel’s failure to object, is a Sixth Amendment claim under §2255(a).
• “You’d have been convicted anyway” is true and irrelevant. The relevant proceeding is the sentencing hearing, and the question is whether the sentence — not the verdict — would have been different.
• The evidence is documentary. The presentence report, the Guidelines manual in force on the sentencing date, and the sentencing transcript are documents. The deficiency is usually visible on their face — a very different proof problem from an uncalled witness.
• The Guidelines anchor the outcome. Molina-Martinez v. United States, 578 U.S. 189, 198–99 (2016), describes the Guidelines as “the framework for sentencing” that “anchor . . . the district court’s discretion.” That is why an inflated range matters even when the sentence imposed also sits inside the correct one.
• Your appeal waiver probably does not bar this. Most collateral-attack waivers are construed not to reach claims of ineffective assistance, and several circuits hold such a waiver unenforceable as to IAC claims — but the language and the circuit both matter.

Is ineffective assistance at sentencing a 2255 claim?

Yes, and it is one of the few Strickland claims where the arithmetic of prejudice works in the movant’s favor.

Sentencing is a “critical stage” at which the Sixth Amendment right to counsel attaches, and a §2255 motion reaches “the right to be released upon the ground that the sentence was imposed in violation of the Constitution.” A sentencing-stage ineffectiveness claim therefore fits §2255(a) directly, without needing any of the statute’s other doorways.

The two-prong framework is the same one that governs every ineffectiveness claim — deficient performance plus prejudice — and it is set out in full at the Strickland v. Washington two-prong test. The full taxonomy of attorney failures courts have accepted is at ineffective assistance of counsel. What is distinct at sentencing is not the test. It is what “the result of the proceeding” means when you apply it.

And the procedural route is settled. Massaro v. United States, 538 U.S. 500 (2003), holds that an ineffective-assistance claim “may be brought in a collateral proceeding under §2255, whether or not the petitioner could have raised the claim on direct appeal,” and that failing to raise it on direct appeal “does not bar the claim from being brought in a later, appropriate proceeding under §2255.” That matters here because sentencing errors are exactly the kind of claim appellate counsel often skips — and because the record needed to prove what counsel should have argued frequently does not exist until it is built in the district court. The Second Circuit made the point specifically in the sentencing context in Michael S. Johnson v. United States, holding a district court erred by treating a procedural bar as applicable where “petitioner’s challenge to the calculation of his base offense level takes the form of a Sixth Amendment ineffective assistance of counsel claim.”

What is Glover v. United States?

Glover v. United States, 531 U.S. 198 (2001), is a unanimous Supreme Court decision holding that there is no minimum quantity of additional prison time required before a sentencing error becomes constitutionally prejudicial.

The facts are ordinary, which is part of why the case matters. Glover’s lawyer failed to argue that certain convictions should be grouped under the Guidelines. The grouping error raised his offense level, and the difference between the correct and incorrect ranges was somewhere between 6 and 21 months. The Seventh Circuit had a rule for that: relief was unavailable where the increase was “not so significant as to render the outcome of sentencing unreliable or fundamentally unfair.”

The Supreme Court rejected that rule outright:

“The Seventh Circuit was incorrect to rely on Lockhart to deny relief to persons attacking their sentence who might show deficient performance in counsel’s failure to object to an error of law affecting the calculation of a sentence because the sentence increase does not meet some baseline standard of prejudice. Authority does not suggest that a minimal amount of additional time in prison cannot constitute prejudice. Quite to the contrary, our jurisprudence suggests that any amount of actual jail time has Sixth Amendment significance.”

The Court then drew a line that is easy to miss and worth holding onto. The size of the increase is not irrelevant — it is simply in the wrong prong. “Although the amount by which a defendant’s sentence is increased by a particular decision may be a factor to consider in determining whether counsel’s performance in failing to argue the point constitutes ineffective assistance, under a determinate system of constrained discretion such as the Sentencing Guidelines it cannot serve as a bar to a showing of prejudice.” In other words: a trivial difference might support an argument that no competent lawyer would have bothered to object. It cannot support an argument that the movant was not prejudiced.

Glover also fixed a doctrinal detour the Government still occasionally revives. Some courts had read Lockhart v. Fretwell to require a showing that the proceeding was rendered “unreliable” or “fundamentally unfair” on top of the reasonable-probability test. Glover quoted Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 393 (2000), for the proposition that such cases “do not justify a departure from a straightforward application of Strickland when the ineffectiveness of counsel does deprive the defendant of a substantive or procedural right to which the law entitles him.”

One honest limit. Glover concerns “the sentencing calculation itself, a calculation resulting from a ruling which, if it had been error, would have been correctable on appeal.” The Court expressly distinguished a case “where trial strategies, in retrospect, might be criticized for leading to a harsher sentence.” Glover is a rule about legal error in the computation, not a license to relitigate every judgment call counsel made at the hearing.

The boundary that makes this claim work

This is the most important paragraph on the page, and it is the reason a sentencing claim that looks hopeless often is not.

A freestanding argument that the district court misapplied the Sentencing Guidelines is generally not cognizable on collateral review. After United States v. Booker, the Guidelines are advisory, and most circuits have held that misapplying an advisory Guideline is not the “fundamental defect which inherently results in a complete miscarriage of justice” that §2255 requires for a non-constitutional error. That exclusion, the circuit authority behind it, and the narrow mandatory-Guidelines exception are owned by claims not cognizable under 2255 — read that page before deciding how to plead.

Now the pivot. The same error, framed as counsel’s failure to object, is a different claim entirely. Ineffective assistance of counsel is a Sixth Amendment violation. A Sixth Amendment violation is a constitutional claim, and §2255(a) reaches a sentence “imposed in violation of the Constitution or laws of the United States” on its own terms. The cognizability problem disappears, because the claim is no longer about the Guidelines. It is about the lawyer.

That is not a semantic trick, and courts do not treat it as one. It changes three things:

	Freestanding Guidelines claim	Same error as ineffective assistance
Nature of the claim	Non-constitutional error of law	Sixth Amendment violation
Cognizable under §2255?	Generally no for an advisory-Guidelines error	Yes
Procedural default	Barred if not raised on direct appeal, absent cause and prejudice	Massaro: not barred by failure to raise on direct appeal
What you must prove	That the range was wrong	That the range was wrong, and that a competent lawyer would have objected, and that the objection would have produced less time
Collateral-attack waiver	Usually enforceable	Frequently not construed to reach IAC claims

The trade is real: the ineffectiveness framing costs you two additional elements. But it converts a claim the court cannot hear into one it must.

Applied Insight — Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., Principal Attorney: When a §2255 file comes in with a sentencing problem, the first thing we do is check how it is framed, because pro se motions almost always frame it the way that loses. A motion that says “the court miscalculated my criminal history” invites a one-paragraph order citing the cognizability rule. The same facts, pleaded as “counsel had the PSR for thirty-five days, the addendum shows no objection was filed, and the objection Rule 32(f) gave him fourteen days to make would have removed two criminal history points and dropped the range,” is a constitutional claim with a documentary record behind it. Nothing about the underlying error changed. What changed is which question the judge has to answer.

My lawyer did not object to the PSR — is that ineffective assistance?

It can be, and this is the largest single subcategory of sentencing IAC in federal practice.

Fed. R. Crim. P. 32 builds a structured objection process, and each step of it creates a place where counsel can fail in a way the record will show:

• Rule 32(e)(2) — the probation officer “must give the presentence report to the defendant, the defendant’s attorney, and an attorney for the government at least 35 days before sentencing unless the defendant waives this minimum period.” Counsel who never reviewed the report with the client, or waived the period without reason, has a problem visible in the docket.
• Rule 32(f)(1) — “Within 14 days after receiving the presentence report, the parties must state in writing any objections, including objections to material information, sentencing guideline ranges, and policy statements contained in or omitted from the report.” Note “or omitted from” — a failure to identify a missing mitigating fact is as much a Rule 32(f) failure as an unchallenged inclusion.
• Rule 32(i)(1)(A) — at sentencing the court “must verify that the defendant and the defendant’s attorney have read and discussed the presentence report and any addendum.”
• Rule 32(i)(3)(A)–(B) — the court “may accept any undisputed portion of the presentence report as a finding of fact,” and must rule on any disputed portion. This is the operative consequence: what counsel does not dispute becomes a finding.

That last point is where the injury actually occurs. An unobjected-to paragraph in the PSR is not merely unchallenged argument; it is available to the court as a finding of fact, and it follows the defendant into the Bureau of Prisons, because Rule 32(i)(3)(C) requires the court to append its determinations “to any copy of the presentence report made available to the Bureau of Prisons.”

The Guidelines side has its own sequence. U.S.S.G. §1B1.1 (Application Instructions) sets out the order of operations for determining the applicable guideline range and the kind of sentence to impose, and §1B1.1(b) directs that after determining the range under subsection (a) and 18 U.S.C. §3553(a)(4) and (5), the court “shall consider the other applicable factors in 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a).” A claim built on a computation error should identify the specific §1B1.1 step where the error entered — base offense level, specific offense characteristics, Chapter Three adjustments, grouping, criminal history — because that is how the court and the Government will analyze it.

The recurring objections that go unmade:

• Drug quantity and converted drug weight, where the PSR attributes more than the record supports.
• Loss amount in fraud cases, computed on gross rather than actual or intended loss.
• Criminal history scoring — stale convictions, consolidated sentences, misclassified state dispositions, status points.
• Career offender and ACCA predicates that do not qualify under the categorical approach.
• Role adjustments — an aggravating role applied without findings, a mitigating role never requested.
• Relevant conduct attributed under §1B1.3 without individualized findings of foreseeability.
• Enhancements the record does not support — firearm, obstruction, vulnerable victim, sophisticated means.

Michael S. Johnson v. United States, 313 F.3d 815 (2d Cir. 2002), is the model of how this claim runs to judgment. Counsel failed to challenge a drug-quantity computation that Application Note 12 to §2D1.1 squarely controlled. The Second Circuit held that counsel’s “representation fell below the ‘range of competence demanded of attorneys'” because he “plainly should have objected,” and held on the second prong that “defense counsel’s failure to object to a sentencing calculation error that likely resulted in an increase in defendant’s period of incarceration constituted ineffective assistance of counsel.” The court vacated the sentence and remanded for resentencing — and it did so even though the sentence imposed also fell within the correctly calculated range.

Mitigation that was never developed

The second category is investigative rather than arithmetic, and it is judged by a different case.

Wiggins v. Smith, Warden, 539 U.S. 510 (2003), holds that when counsel calls an omission “strategy,” the court examines the investigation behind it, not the label: “a reviewing court must consider the reasonableness of the investigation said to support that strategy,” and “Strickland does not establish that a cursory investigation automatically justifies a tactical decision with respect to sentencing strategy.” Wiggins was itself a sentencing case — the omission was a social history that would have shown severe childhood abuse — so it applies to the federal sentencing hearing directly rather than by analogy.

Sentencing-stage mitigation in a federal case is a defined body of material: medical and psychiatric records, substance-use history and treatment records, military service records, employment and education history, letters from family and community, evidence of the defendant’s role relative to co-defendants, documentation of rehabilitation since arrest. Where none of it was gathered, the claim is a failure-to-investigate claim wearing sentencing clothes — and the proof requirements are the same ones set out at ineffective assistance of counsel failure to investigate: you must produce the material now and say what it would have shown.

There is one respect in which the sentencing version is easier. At trial, the prejudice question is whether a jury would have acquitted. At sentencing, it is whether the judge — the same judge, whose reasoning is on the record in the sentencing transcript — would have imposed less time. That is a narrower, more concrete, and more provable question, and the transcript often tells you the answer. A judge who said “I have nothing before me about this defendant’s background” has already described the prejudice.

Failure to argue for a variance under 18 U.S.C. §3553(a)

The Guidelines range is one factor among several, and a lawyer who treats it as the whole hearing has left the most discretionary part of federal sentencing unargued.

18 U.S.C. §3553(a) opens with the parsimony command: “The court shall impose a sentence sufficient, but not greater than necessary, to comply with the purposes set forth in paragraph (2) of this subsection.” It then lists the factors the court “shall consider,” including “the nature and circumstances of the offense and the history and characteristics of the defendant,” the need for deterrence and public protection, “the kinds of sentences available,” the Guidelines range under §3553(a)(4), pertinent policy statements, and “the need to avoid unwarranted sentence disparities among defendants with similar records who have been found guilty of similar conduct.”

A variance claim is harder than a computation claim. A computation error has a right answer; a variance argument does not. Counsel’s decision about what to emphasize is the kind of judgment Strickland‘s strong presumption protects, and a court will rarely find deficient performance in the choice of which §3553(a) themes to press.

What is not protected is the failure to make any argument at all, or the failure to make an argument grounded in facts counsel never gathered — which is the Wiggins problem again. The viable version of this claim is documentary: counsel filed no sentencing memorandum, offered no §3553(a) argument on the record, identified no available departure or variance ground, and did not know the mitigating facts because he had not looked for them. The sentencing transcript establishes the first three points on its face.

Failure to preserve the objection for appeal

A separate injury flows from silence at sentencing even when the district judge would have overruled the objection: the standard of review on appeal changes.

An objection made and overruled is reviewed on appeal for Guidelines-application error, with legal conclusions reviewed de novo. An objection never made is forfeited, and reviewed at most for plain error under Fed. R. Crim. P. 52(b) — a materially harder standard requiring an error that is clear or obvious, that affected substantial rights, and that seriously affects the fairness, integrity, or public reputation of judicial proceedings. Counsel’s silence therefore costs the defendant an appellate remedy independent of whatever it cost at the hearing.

This is also where Molina-Martinez v. United States, 578 U.S. 189 (2016), belongs, and its posture has to be stated correctly. Molina-Martinez is a plain-error decision under Rule 52(b), not a Strickland decision. It holds that “[w]hen a defendant is sentenced under an incorrect Guidelines range — whether or not the defendant’s ultimate sentence falls within the correct range — the error itself can, and most often will, be sufficient to show a reasonable probability of a different outcome absent the error,” and that “in the ordinary case a defendant will satisfy his burden to show prejudice by pointing to the application of an incorrect, higher Guidelines range and the sentence he received thereunder.”

Why it matters here, notwithstanding the different posture: the Court’s reasoning is about how federal sentencing actually operates. The Guidelines are “the framework for sentencing” and “anchor . . . the district court’s discretion”; they are “not only the starting point for most federal sentencing proceedings but also the lodestar.” That is a description of causation, and it is what answers the Government’s most common response to a sentencing IAC claim — that the sentence imposed was also available under the correct range, so no harm was done. Molina-Martinez explains why courts should not assume that, and Johnson reached the same conclusion in a §2255 posture on materially identical facts.

Allocution — and the limit that goes with it

Rule 32(i)(4)(A) requires the court, before imposing sentence, to “provide the defendant’s attorney an opportunity to speak on the defendant’s behalf” and to “address the defendant personally in order to permit the defendant to speak or present any information to mitigate the sentence.” Counsel who never prepares the client for that moment has failed at a real task: allocution is the only point at which the defendant speaks directly to the judge, and an unprepared or counterproductive statement can move a sentence in the wrong direction.

But this category comes with a limit that most pages omit, and it changes how the claim has to be pleaded. In Hill v. United States, 368 U.S. 424 (1962), the Supreme Court held that “the failure to follow the formal requirements of Rule 32(a) is not of itself an error that can be raised by collateral attack.” A denial of allocution, standing alone, “is neither jurisdictional nor constitutional,” and “is not a fundamental defect which inherently results in a complete miscarriage of justice, nor an omission inconsistent with the rudimentary demands of fair procedure.”

So the freestanding allocution claim fails on §2255 for the same structural reason the freestanding Guidelines claim does — and the same pivot applies. An allocution claim survives only as ineffective assistance, and only with an actual prejudice showing: what the defendant would have said, why it would have mattered to this judge, and how it connects to the sentence imposed. That showing is genuinely difficult. A movant whose strongest claim is that allocution went badly should be candid with counsel about how much weight it can carry.

The sentencing-failure table

What each sentencing-stage failure requires, and how prejudice is measured

Failure	What counsel did (or did not do)	What the movant must show	How prejudice is measured	Primary source
No objection to the PSR	Filed no Rule 32(f)(1) objections within 14 days; disputed facts became findings under Rule 32(i)(3)(A)	The specific paragraph, the correct computation, and that a competent lawyer would have objected	Difference between the imposed range and the corrected range, in months	Fed. R. Crim. P. 32(f), (i)(3); Michael S. Johnson v. United States, 313 F.3d 815 (2d Cir. 2002)
Guidelines computation error unchallenged	Accepted a base offense level, enhancement, grouping, or criminal history score that the manual in force did not support	The §1B1.1 step where the error entered and the corrected offense level or criminal history category	Any additional imprisonment — no minimum	Glover v. United States, 531 U.S. 198, 203–04 (2001); U.S.S.G. §1B1.1
No mitigation investigated or presented	Gathered no records, contacted no witnesses, filed no sentencing memorandum	The material itself, attached now, and that a reasonable investigation would have found it	Reasonable probability the same judge would have imposed less time	Wiggins v. Smith, Warden, 539 U.S. 510, 527 (2003)
No §3553(a) variance argument	Made no argument beyond the range; identified no departure or variance ground	That the omission rested on facts never gathered, not on a judgment call — the transcript showing no argument was made	Reasonable probability of a below-range sentence	18 U.S.C. §3553(a); Wiggins, 539 U.S. at 527
Objection not preserved for appeal	Stayed silent, converting the issue to plain-error review or forfeiting it entirely	That the objection was available and non-frivolous at the time	Loss of de novo appellate review, plus the sentencing difference itself	Fed. R. Crim. P. 52(b); Molina-Martinez v. United States, 578 U.S. 189, 198–99 (2016) (plain-error posture)
Client not prepared for allocution	Gave no guidance before the Rule 32(i)(4)(A)(ii) statement, or waived it	What the defendant would have said and why it would have mattered to this judge	Hardest of the six — the freestanding Rule 32 violation is not cognizable	Fed. R. Crim. P. 32(i)(4)(A); Hill v. United States, 368 U.S. 424, 428–29 (1962)

How much extra time counts as prejudice?

Any. That is the whole of Glover‘s answer, and the number is worth stating concretely because movants routinely assume a threshold exists.

In Glover itself, the difference between the correct and incorrect Guidelines ranges was between 6 and 21 months, and the Court held that was enough — indeed, held that the size of the difference “cannot serve as a bar to a showing of prejudice” at all. A two-level offense-level error is often a difference of six to twelve months at mid-range offense levels. A single criminal history point that moves a defendant from Category III to Category IV can move a range by a year or more. A career-offender designation frequently doubles it. Each of those is prejudice under Glover.

Practically, this means a well-built sentencing claim states the arithmetic explicitly and shows the work:

1. The range the court used — offense level, criminal history category, and resulting months, cited to the PSR paragraph and the sentencing transcript.
2. The error — the specific §1B1.1 step, the specific Guidelines provision, and the specific PSR paragraph that got it wrong.
3. The corrected range — recomputed under the manual in force on the sentencing date, per 18 U.S.C. §3553(a)(4)(A)(ii).
4. The difference, in months, at both ends of the range.
5. The record evidence of anchoring — anything the judge said tying the sentence to the range (“bottom of the guidelines,” “a guideline sentence is appropriate here”).

Point 5 is what defeats the Government’s standard response, which is that the court would have imposed the same sentence anyway. Sometimes it would have, and where the sentencing transcript shows the judge announcing a sentence driven entirely by §3553(a) factors independent of the range, the claim is weak. Where the transcript shows the judge working from the range, it is strong.

What if I would have been convicted anyway?

Then you would have been convicted anyway — and the claim is unaffected.

This is the single most common reason movants abandon a valid sentencing claim, and it rests on a misunderstanding of what Strickland‘s prejudice prong asks. The test is whether there is a reasonable probability that “the result of the proceeding” would have been different. Where the deficient performance occurred at sentencing, the proceeding is the sentencing hearing, and the result is the sentence. Guilt is not in issue.

Glover makes this structural rather than merely logical. The Court’s whole holding concerns “persons attacking their sentence,” and it addresses “the sentencing calculation itself.” Nothing in Strickland or Glover requires a sentencing-stage movant to say anything at all about the strength of the evidence of guilt.

The practical consequence is large. A defendant who pleaded guilty, who does not dispute the conduct, and who has no viable challenge to the conviction may still have a strong §2255 claim if the sentence was computed wrong and counsel said nothing. Those are, in fact, the most common facts in this category. If the only reason you have not looked at your sentencing transcript is that you are guilty, that is not a reason.

Applied Insight — Christopher Zoukis, JD, MBA, Managing Director: The sentencing claim is the one clients most often have and least often recognize, because the question they ask themselves is “did I do it,” and that is not the question the claim turns on. When we review a file we read the PSR and the sentencing transcript side by side and count: how many paragraphs drew a written objection, what the addendum shows was resolved, and how many minutes counsel spoke before the sentence was imposed. Those three numbers tell you very quickly whether there is something here. A sentencing hearing where counsel filed nothing and spoke for two minutes is not a hearing that developed anything for the judge to weigh. That is a record fact, and it is on the transcript.

Does my appeal waiver block this claim?

Usually not — but the answer depends on the words in your plea agreement and on your circuit, and the Government’s broad position on waivers should not be taken as settled law.

Two distinctions matter. First, an appeal waiver and a collateral-attack waiver are different provisions; many plea agreements contain one and not the other, and a waiver of the right to appeal does not by itself waive §2255. Second, most collateral-attack waivers are drafted with, or judicially construed to contain, an exception for claims of ineffective assistance of counsel — at minimum for claims going to the validity of the plea or the waiver itself, and in several circuits more broadly. Courts have also declined to enforce a waiver where doing so would immunize counsel’s own deficient performance from any review.

The practical questions to answer before assuming you are barred:

• Does the agreement waive collateral attack at all, or only direct appeal?
• Does it carve out ineffective assistance expressly, and if so, how narrowly?
• Does it carve out sentences above a stated Guidelines range or statutory maximum?
• What is your circuit’s rule on enforcing a collateral-attack waiver against a sentencing IAC claim?

Because circuits differ on the last question, this page does not state a national rule. The enforceability analysis, the circuit positions, and what survives a waiver are treated at appeal waiver and collateral-attack waiver. Where the challenge is to the advice that produced the plea rather than to the sentence, the governing analysis is at guilty plea ineffective assistance.

One deadline warning applies regardless. The §2255 one-year period runs from the latest of four trigger dates and does not pause while you obtain the transcript or the PSR. Compute it first at the 2255 deadline calculator, and check the full deadline map at post-conviction deadlines. If you do not have the sentencing transcript or the presentence report, requesting them is the first step — see getting transcripts, the PSR, and your file. And where the sentencing failure was appellate counsel’s rather than trial counsel’s, the claim runs through ineffective appellate counsel.

Why work with Elizabeth Franklin-Best, P.C.

Elizabeth Franklin-Best founded the firm in 2019 and practices federal criminal appeals and post-conviction relief nationwide, with more than 20 years of federal and appellate criminal defense experience. She is admitted to the U.S. Supreme Court and twelve of the thirteen U.S. Courts of Appeals — every regional circuit (1st–11th) plus the D.C. Circuit — and has handled more than 330 federal proceedings, over 100 of them appeals, with sixteen published decisions as counsel of record. She is recognized by Best Lawyers in America 2026 for Appellate Practice and by Chambers USA 2026 for Litigation: White-Collar Crime & Government Investigations, and her practice includes sentencing mitigation and Guidelines objections alongside §2255 and appellate work.

Christopher Zoukis, JD, MBA, is the firm’s Managing Director and a nationally recognized federal prison expert, author of the Federal Prison Handbook and four other books on the federal system, and Chairman of the Board of the Human Rights Defense Center.

The firm runs a national federal practice on an intentionally small caseload, from offices in Columbia and Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, and is admitted pro hac vice in federal courts from Montana to Florida. A sentencing claim is built from the presentence report, the Guidelines manual in force on the sentencing date, and the transcript — and that is where a review of this kind starts.

Talk to a federal post-conviction lawyer

If your sentencing hearing was short, no objections were filed, and no mitigation was presented, that is worth a look before your one-year deadline runs. Schedule a case review or call (843) 620-1100. Bring the judgment, the presentence report and any addendum, the sentencing transcript, and your plea agreement if you have one. If you are not sure which motion applies to your situation, start at the hub: federal 2255 motion lawyer.

Frequently Asked Questions About Ineffective Assistance at Sentencing

Reviewed for legal accuracy by Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., Principal Attorney·September 2026