Essay On Gideon V. Cochron

Clarence Earl Gideon was a 51 year old man who was arrested for breaking into a pool hall in Panama City, Florida in 1961. Clarence spent much of his early adult life in and out of prisons for nonviolent crimes being convicted of burglary, robbery, and larceny four times, excluding the arrest in Panama City making it his fifth. At his first trial, Gideon was too poor to afford a lawyer so he asked for a court-delegated lawyer however his request was denied because of the fact that in the state of Florida lawyers are given only if the defendant committed a capital crime and Gideon’s case wasn’t reviewed as a capital offense. Prosecutors asked the witnesses who claimed Gideon was outside the pool hall close to the time of the break-in yet none

Gideon asked for another re-trial but then denied his request because of the lawyers the trial judge were going to give him. One of the lawyers was an alcoholic and another was completely against alcohol and this would only bring the downfall of Gideon. The lawsuit was initially Gideon v. Cochran; the last name referred to H.G. Cochran, Jr., the director of Florida's Division of corrections. When the case was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, Cochran had been succeeded by Louie L. Wainwright. After the Florida Supreme Court maintained the lower court's ruling, Gideon filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case. During the time, the Supreme Court had already dealt with several cases concerning the right to counsel. In Powell v. Alabama, taking place in 1932, which involved the “Scottsboro Boys,” nine black teenagers who had been found guilty of raping two white women, the court had ruled that indigent defendants charged with capital crimes were entitled to legal counsel. In Betts v. Brady, taking place in 1942, the court decided that assigned counsel was not required in felony cases except when there

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. The decision overturned Betts v. Brady, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black stated that “reason and reflection require us to recognize that in our adversary system of criminal justice, any person hauled into court, who is too poor to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him.” He further wrote that the “noble ideal” of “fair trials before impartial tribunals in which ever defendant stands equal before the law . . . cannot be realized if