Criminal Justice: Gideon’s Impact

Few Supreme Court decisions have been so universally admired as Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), which reversed the burglary conviction of Clarence Gideon, a Florida indigent, because he had been denied free counsel at his trial. The Constitution entitles every defendant to a lawyer, said the court.

Why jeopardize him because he can not afford one?

All American courts were ordered to provide lawyers for indigents in trials of serious crimes, and since 60% of all defendants are indigents, the decision was bound to have enormous impact.

Moreover, the Supreme Court not only made Gideon retroactive; it later ex tended the ruling to all defendants who plead guilty rather than stand trial (up to 90% in some states). In addition, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled last January that Gideon applies to misdemeanors as well as felonies (Harvey v. Mississippi).

Learning by Defending. As a result of all this, says Research Attorney Lee Silverstein of the American Bar Foundation, 26 states have instituted vital reforms. In the American Bar Association Journal, Silverstein reports that the Gideon case has particularly affected Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, where a poor man’s right to free counsel previously covered only capital cases. The right now covers felonies in all five states. Florida, which produced Gideon, has set up a statewide public-defender system and now permits law students to defend indigents—as do New York, Colorado, Connecticut and Massachusetts.

As another Gideon effect, says Silverstein, states have begun to follow the federal rule that a defendant must know what he is doing when he waives the right to counsel. Written waivers are now required in North Carolina, West Virginia and Massachusetts. In other states, the number of waivers is declining. Moreover, indigents who request lawyers at the preliminary hearing in any felony case now get them in Utah, Idaho, Illinois, Virginia and New Mexico. As for misdemeanors, Massachusetts now requires counsel in any case punishable by imprisonment. Texas and New York will soon follow suit.

Some lawyers predict that Gideon will eventually be extended to juvenile courts which, being noncriminal courts, do not yet guarantee even affluent delinquents the Sixth Amendment right to counsel “in all criminal prosecutions.” As a start, the National Council of Juvenile Court Judges plans to provide lawyers for indigent delinquents in Chicago, Newark, Cleveland and parts of North Carolina.

Pride & Problems. Widely praised as it is, though, Gideon has inevitably raised problems. It pointed the way for Escobedo v. Illinois (1964), which recognize an accused’s right to see his lawyer during police interrogation and started the current U.S. confession controversy, and it has not been easy to apply in such judicial crises as last summer’s Watts riot, which swamped Los Angeles courts with more than 4,000 indigent Negro defendants. The N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund charges that the arrested Negroes got almost no legal aid. But the California Supreme Court has refused to hear the Fund’s Gideon-based appeal—as did the U.S. Supreme Court last week.

No one is prouder of Gideon’s impact than Clarence Gideon himself, who was later retried with counsel—and acquitted. Now 55, Gideon is a gaunt gas station attendant in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., with an unbounded faith in lawyers. “I’ve seen ignorant white people and Negroes accused of petty larceny,” he says, “and if they had a lawyer they’d get six months, but without one they’d get 15 years. I tell you the prisons are full of lifers who wouldn’t have got near that much if a lawyer had handled them. I didn’t start out to do anything for anybody but myself, but this decision has done a helluva lot of good for those people.”