Gideon V. Wainwright - Legal Background

Legal Background

The Supreme Court had ruled in Powell v. Alabama, 287 U.S. 45 (1932), the famous case of the Scottsboro Boys, that the Sixth Amendment's Assistance of Counsel Clause included a right to appointed counsel in certain capital cases, and that this right as incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment. In Betts v. Brady, 316 U.S. 455 (1942), the Court extended Powell's "special circumstances" rule to non-capital cases. Specifically, the Court focused on a case-by-case determination if the lack of representation effected a denial of due process, thus rendering the trial unfair. Over the next twenty years, the Court heard several more cases and in all of them ruled that, in fact, a lawyer was required. Due to the difficulty of proving the high standard of a due process error, nearly all such cases involved the death penalty. This view had not changed by the early 1960s.