In Hinton v. Alabama (2013), the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Anthony Ray Hinton had received ineffective assistance of counsel in violation of his Sixth Amendment rights, due to his lawyer's misunderstanding about the amount of funds available for expert witnesses which significantly impacted on the defense strategy. Mr. Hinton was convicted in 1985 for two murders based largely on forensic evidence suggesting that bullets from the crime scenes matched a revolver found at his home. His court-appointed attorney mistakenly believed he only had $1,000 to hire a ballistics expert and consequently hired one who was visually impaired and admitted to having trouble operating his microscope, leading him to be discredited during trial by prosecution’s experts’ testimony. The Supreme Court held this constituted deficient performance by counsel as there were clearly more qualified experts available within budget if correctly understood.

The dissenting opinion in the Hinton v. Alabama case argued that the defendant's Sixth Amendment right to effective counsel was not violated, as his attorney made a strategic decision based on reasonable professional judgment at that time. The defense lawyer had hired an expert witness within budget constraints imposed by state law and believed this expert to be competent. It was only after trial that it became clear the expert lacked credibility due to past mistakes unrelated to this case, which could not have been anticipated by the defense attorney. Therefore, according to this view, there wasn't any deficient performance from counsel under Strickland v Washington standard for ineffective assistance of counsel claims.