Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963), argued 15 Jan. 1963, decided 18 Mar. 1963 by vote of 9 to 0; black for the Court, Douglas, Clark, and Harlan concurring. Clarence Earl Gideon was charged with breaking and entering a poolroom with intent to commit a misdemeanor, a felony under Florida law. Being without funds, Gideon requested that counsel be appointed for him; the Florida trial court refused and Gideon conducted his own defense “about as well as could be expected from a layman” (p. 337). The jury returned a verdict of guilty. Gideon filed a
habeas corpus petition in the Florida Supreme Court claiming that his federal constitutional rights had been abridged by the trial court's refusal to appoint counsel for him; the Florida Supreme Court denied relief and Gideon appealed
in forma pauperis to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Court appointed Abe
Fortas, a prominent lawyer who later served as a justice, to argue Gideon's case and address whether
Betts v. Brady (1942) should be overruled.
Betts had held that, in
state courts, the
Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause only required that appointed counsel be provided to indigents in special circumstances. However, the Court had not upheld a single denial of right to counsel under the
Betts rule since its 1950 decision in
Quicksal v. Michigan. The Court was looking for an opportunity to overrule
Betts, and
Gideon provided that opportunity.
A unanimous Court overruled
Betts and held that the Sixth Amendment, as applied to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment, required that counsel be appointed to represent indigent defendants charged with serious offenses in state criminal trials. At his retrial, Gideon was represented by appointed counsel who uncovered new defense witnesses and discredited prosecution witnesses; a new jury acquitted Gideon.
In overruling
Betts, Justice Hugo
Black, for the majority, argued that the Court was “returning to … old precedents, sounder we believe than the new” (p. 334). In
Powell v. Alabama (1932), the Court had held that when an indigent defendant is charged with a capital offense in a state court and is incapable of making his own defense, due process requires that counsel be appointed for him. It noted that “the right to be heard would be of little avail if it did not comprehend the right to be heard by counsel” (p. 68). In
Johnson v. Zerbst (1938), the Court declared a right to appointed counsel in federal criminal cases. By 1942, thirty‐five states required that counsel be appointed to represent indigents in serious noncapital as well as capital cases. Indeed, in
Gideon twenty‐two states filed an amicus curiae brief urging reversal of
Betts and only three states, including Florida, argued that
Betts should be upheld.
Gideon was widely interpreted as applying only to felony cases; but, in
Argersinger v. Hamlin (1972), the Court extended the right to appointed counsel to misdemeanors when the defendant is sentenced to imprisonment. In another case decided the same day as
Gideon, Douglas v. California, the Court held that the
Equal Protection Clause conferred a right to appointed counsel for first appeals of right. In subsequent years,
Gideon spawned two lines of cases. One series of cases deals with the Sixth Amendment right to counsel and at what stages of the criminal justice process the defendant must be allowed the benefit of counsel. Another line of cases acknowledges that the right to counsel implies the right to effective counsel and attempts to develop standards for determining when that right had been denied.
Today, most large cities and some states have public defender offices that provide counsel to indigents in criminal cases. In other regions, trial court judges appoint private attorneys to represent indigent defendants. A 1984 Department of Justice survey reported that two‐thirds of the nation's population is served by public defenders. Various studies have shown that a defendant's chance of being convicted is not significantly affected by whether he is represented by a public defender or private counsel, although defendants who proceed without counsel are significantly more likely to be convicted.
Gideon, along with
Mapp v. Ohio (1961), marked the beginning of the Court's “due process revolution,” which resulted in the constitutionalization of state criminal procedure and a series of only partially successful attempts to convince the Court to extend due process guarantees to civil and quasi‐legal proceedings.
See also
Counsel, Right to;
Sixth Amendment.
Bibliography
Anthony Lewis , Gideon's Trumpet (1964).
Susan E. Lawrence
