A method and apparatus for decoding trellis-coded digital data. Digital data samples that have been convolutionally encoded by trellis-coded modulation (TCM) for purposes of forward error correction require a computationally intensive Viterbi decoder for best performance. A technique known as pragmatic trellis-code modulation (PTCM) reduces decoder complexity but at the expense of degraded performance in some situations. This disclosure provides a solution that retains the reduced complexity of PTCM, but uses a full trellis approach that yields significantly better performance in terms of bit error rate (BER).