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Clarence Earl Gideon Case

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Recommended: Importance of the sixth amendment

Clarence Earl Gideon was not someone you would expect to be a hero. According to www.uscourts.gov, he left school after the 8th grade and decided to run away from home. “He was mostly a drifter, spending time in and out of prison for nonviolent crimes,” their website reads. When he was 51 years old, he was accused of breaking into a bar in Florida and arrested. He was too poor to afford a lawyer, so when he got to court, he asked the judge to appoint him one, according to his rights under the Sixth Amendment. The judge refused, and he had to represent himself. “He made an opening statement to the jury, cross-examined the prosecution 's witnesses, brought witnesses in his own defense, declined to testify himself, and made arguments emphasizing …show more content…

He then sent a petition to the Florida Supreme Court, claiming that his rights under the Sixth Amendment had been violated. The Florida Supreme Court denied his petition. So, he sent a letter to the United States Supreme Court asking them to hear his case, and they agreed. On January 15, 1963, Clarence Earl Gideon went to court again. The verdict was decided 64 days later, on March 18, 1963. On an unanimous vote, the Supreme Court ruled in Gideon’s favor. He was given another trial and the charges were acquitted. His efforts against this issue led to it being made known that no matter the crime, each and every person must be provided a lawyer if they cannot afford one themselves. “If an obscure Florida convict named Clarence Earl Gideon had not sat down in his prison cell with a pencil and paper to write a letter to the Supreme Court, and if the Court had not taken the trouble to look for merit in that one crude petition ... the vast machinery of American law would have gone on functioning undisturbed. But Gideon did write that letter, the Court did look into his case ... and the whole course of American legal history has been changed.” - Attorney General Robert F.

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Prior to the case of Gideon v. Wainwright, defendant Clarence Earl Gideon was charged with breaking and entering in the state of Florida. This crime is a felony according to Florida state law. Unable to pay for defense counsel, Gideon requested that the court grant him one for free. The court denied Gideon his request of being granted defense counsel. The court stated, “Under the laws of the State of Florida, the only time the Court can appoint Counsel to represent a Defendant is when that person charged with a capital offense.”

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The trial court denied these motions and the statements were used at trial. The jury found petitioner guilty of murder and was sentence to a 24-year prison term. On appeal, Petitioner argued that he had not “knowingly and intelligently” waived his 6th amendment right to counsel before he gave his uncounseled post indictment

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Clarence Gideon was accused of breaking and entering the bay harbor poolroom. he went to court and was found guilty. he went to prison for two years and he wrote to the supreme court during that time, it was taken in committee and Clarence 's letter helped overturn Brady and now everyone gets a court appointed lawyer if need. his letter was read and he got a second trial because his second was found to be unfair. he won his second trial and got out of jail.

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Gideon v. Wainwright was a Supreme Court case that approached criminal justice around the mid 1950s and 1960s. In certain states criminals were not receiving fair representation in courts, which violated the Sixth Amendment. It wasn’t until the Supreme Court case Gideon v. Wainwright of 1963 that this issue changed. Gideon v. Wainwright was the most controversial and influential the Supreme Court ever took on, due to the fact that it challenged the very way criminals are incarcerated by the court themselves. Earl Gideon was a man with an eighth-grade education, he ran away from home when he was in middle school.

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He believed that it was unconstitutional to get an increased sentence based on the evidence that was given. His argument was that according to the due process clause it must be proven beyond reasonable doubt to a jury. He claimed it wasn’t constitutional for a judge to make that ruling just based on the evidence presented to him. The main question of this case was whether the fourth amendment requires that an improved maximum prison term for an offense of ten to twenty years be proven with facts beyond the reasonable

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He did not have a lawyer for his trial because he could not afford one, so he went to court representing himself. The Florida state law, stated that an attorney may only be appointed to an defendant in capital cases, so in that case the trial court did not appoint a attorney to Gideon. He presented witnesses in his own defense, declined to testify himself, and made arguments emphasizing his innocence in trial. Despite his efforts, Gideon eventually lost his case while representing himself, so he was found guilty and went to prison for five years in the state of Florida. Gideon proposed a handwritten court petition for his case.

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Gideon v. Wainwright was a Supreme Court case in 1963 where the court ruled that the courts had to provide counsel to the party being charged if they could not afford one. Clarence Earl Gideon was charged with breaking and entering in the Bay Harbor Pool Room in Panama City, Florida. He could not afford an attorney and the court denied his request for them to provide him one since it was not a capital offense, in that time courts were not required to provide an attorney to a party on trail if the crime was not a capital offense. Gideon was found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison. He originally sent his request that his trail was unfair to the Florida Supreme Court; it was denied.

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On that same day, the jury of the Trial Court in Florida found Gideon guilty, and the judge sentenced him to 5 years in prison. While Gideon was in prison, he researched the Constitution of the United States, and found that the 14th Amendment simply stated his cause, therein: “No state shall deprive any person of life, liberty or the due process of the law.” Gideon further researched the law, in order to determine the process to appeal his conviction. He found the necessary steps were first to petition the Florida court for habeas corpus, in which he wrote of the violation of his 14th amendment rights. The Florida Supreme Court ruled alongside the District Court, and denied his petition.

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The state of Florida should not have denied him the right to representation. Because Gideon now had no representation, he was left on his own. During a trial, he had to defend himself and did not do a good job of doing so. Gideon had no form of knowledge about the law, so he did not know exactly how to defend himself. He was found guilty and was now given five years in prison.

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A person’s right to have a lawyer and having a fair trial is protected by the Sixth Amendment. These clauses are enforced by Gideon v. Wainwright, where the Supreme Court ruled that criminal defendant has the right to have legal counsel if they could not afford one (“Facts and Case Summary – Gideon v. Wainwright”). Public defenders, or lawyers appointed by the court, provide representation in court without cost to the defendant. Fifty years after the ruling, public attorneys has been under scrutiny by both lawyers and clients. Said counsels are known for facing underfunding and unmanageable caseloads, while their clients claim that they are poorly represented in court.

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On January 15, 1963, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Gideon v. Wainwright. Abe Fortas, a Washington, D.C., attorney, and future Supreme Court justice, represented Gideon for free before the high court. He eschewed the safer argument that Gideon was a special case because he had only had an eighth-grade education level. Instead, Fortas asserted that no defendant, however competent or well educated, could provide an adequate self-defense against the state and that the U.S. Constitution ensured legal representation to all defendants charged with felonies. Two months later the court unanimously ruled that the denial of an attorney violated the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees due process.

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At his trial, Gideon appeared in court without representation. While in open court, he asked the judge to appoint counsel for him because he could not afford an attorney. The judge denied Gideon’s request

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Gideon requested the state of Florida to appoint a counsel to defend him, but the judge denied his request because it was not a capital case meaning crimes may be warranted the death penalty. Thus Gideon was forced to defend himself against the prosecutor who was a well trained lawyer. An old man who quit school after the eighth grade versus a lawyer, Gideon was found guilty unsurprisingly, and he was

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