Читать книгу Keeping the Republic - Christine Barbour - Страница 163

Closely related to the Miranda decision, which upholds the right to a lawyer during police questioning, is the Sixth Amendment declaration that the accused shall “have the assistance of counsel for his defense.” The founders’ intentions are fairly clear from the Crimes Act of 1790, which required courts to provide counsel for poor defendants only in capital cases—that is, those punishable by death. Defendants in other trials had a right to counsel, but the government had no obligation to provide it. The Supreme Court’s decisions were in line with that act until 1938, when, in Johnson v. Zerbst, it extended the government’s obligation to provide counsel to impoverished defendants in all criminal proceedings in federal courts.⁸⁴ Only federal crimes carried that obligation until 1963. Then, in one of the most dramatic tales of courtroom appeals (so exciting that it was made into both a book and a movie called Gideon’s Trumpet), a poor man named Clarence Earl Gideon was convicted of breaking and entering a pool hall and stealing money from the vending machine. Gideon asked the judge for a lawyer, but the judge told him that the state of Florida was not obligated to give him one. He tried to defend the case himself but lost to the far more skilled and knowledgeable prosecutor. Serving five years in prison for a crime he swore he did not commit, he filed a handwritten appeal with the Supreme Court. In a landmark decision, Gideon v. Wainwright, the Court incorporated the Sixth Amendment right to counsel.⁸⁵

The Gideon decision was a tremendous financial and administrative burden for the states, which had to retry or release many prisoners. Conservatives believed that Gideon went far beyond the founders’ intentions. Both the Burger and Rehnquist Courts succeeded in rolling back some of the protections won by Gideon, ruling, for instance, that the right to a court-appointed attorney does not extend beyond the filing of one round of appeals, even if the convicted indigent person is on death row.⁸⁶