Gideon v. Wainwright

Writing for the unanimous Court, Justice Black stated the rationale for overturning Betts in simple terms. This was for him--and apparently for the rest of the Court--a straightforward decision:

[R]eason and reflection require us to recognize that in our adversary system of justice, any person haled into court, who is too poor to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him. This seems to us an obvious truth.

The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been the vehicle for applying other Bill of Rights guarantees at the state level, again saw service in the ongoing "due process revolution" being led by Justice Black. After Gideon, every indigent defendant charged with a serious crime in state court (criminal trials are almost invariably heard in state courts) would be appointed legal counsel as required by the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of the right to a fair trial. The Court soon extended this right, in Argersinger v. Hamlin (1972) to misdemeanor defendants sentenced to imprisonment. In 1984, in Strickland v. Washington, the principle first enunciated by the Supreme Court in Gideon was elaborated to include a right to effective legal representation.

Clarence Gideon was retried on 5 August 1963, in the Panama City Courthouse. This time an experienced trial lawyer, W. Fred Turner, argued his case, and this time Gideon was found innocent. A book about Clarence Gideon's pursuit of his constitutional rights, Anthony Lewis' Gideon's Trumpet, was made into a Hollywood film. But the true measure of Gideon's victory is not that it makes a compelling narrative, but that its effects are so far-reaching. Most large cities now maintain public defender offices that serve indigent clients like Gideon. In other parts of the country, judges appoint private attorneys to serve as representatives for criminal defendants who cannot afford to pay for their own lawyers. In 1984, the Justice Department estimated that two-thirds of the American population is served by the public defender system.