Gideon v. Wainwright

In January 1962, a prisoner in the Florida State Prison named Clarence Earl Gideon made a handwritten petition to the U.S. Supreme Court. Gideon protested his confinement, claiming that he did not receive a fair trial. He could not afford an attorney and therefore had to represent himself, which resulted in his conviction. One year later, the Supreme Court unanimously voted to order a new trial, and it declared the right to counsel to be an inseparable part of due process. Gideon won his retrial. Observers immediately heralded Gideon's victory as an example of the legal system's self-correcting ability to ensure justice for all people, however poor and destitute. But in recent years, critics have noted that the Supreme Court has restricted the right of prisoners to challenge their [Page 618]confinement, making it more difficult for them to emulate Gideon's example.

After a life of failed marriages, odd jobs, and multiple surgeries to treat tuberculosis, Gideon was sentenced to 5 years in prison in 1961, at the age of 51, for the crime of burglarizing the Bay Harbor Pool Poolroom in Panama City, Florida. At his first trial, prosecutors produced witnesses who saw Gideon outside the pool hall near the time of the break-in but none who saw him commit the crime. Gideon cross-examined witnesses, but he was unable to impeach their credibility or point out the contradictions in their testimony, as his court-appointed attorney was later able to do at the retrial. Abe Fortas, the powerful Washington, D.C., attorney who represented Gideon for free before the U.S. Supreme Court, seized on this fact as the central premise of his argument—that no defendant, however competent or well educated, can provide an adequate self-defense against the state. Fortas and Gideon eschewed the safer argument that Gideon was a special case who should have received a court-appointed lawyer under the Florida law that made exceptions for illiterate or mentally ill defendants.

Fortas and Gideon instead argued that the Constitution ensures a right to counsel. The Supreme Court had been back and forth on this issue for several decades. In the notorious case of the Scottsboro Boys, Powell v. Alabama of 1932, the court found a constitutional right to counsel but allowed each state to devise its own rules for providing lawyers to defendants. Some states, such as Florida, routinely denied counsel to defendants, unless they could prove they were illiterate, mentally infirm, or faced with an especially complicated indictment. Other states, such as California, developed a public defender system to provide each defendant with a lawyer. The Supreme Court upheld this patchwork system in Betts v. Brady in 1942. The court's unanimous ruling in Gideon v. Wainwright overturned the Betts decision and directed the U.S. Justice Department to guide states in making court-appointed attorneys routine.

The Supreme Court has never reversed the Gideon decision, but it has restricted the right of prisoners to appeal state-court convictions to federal courts. Furthermore, many states have been unable to provide full funding to their public defenders' offices. Growing choruses of critics, including former Illinois Governor Frank Ryan, have unearthed numerous cases of defendants who were wrongly convicted despite being represented by court-appointed lawyers at their trial.

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