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.
Read more about this topic: Gideon V. Wainwright
Famous quotes containing the words legal and/or background:
“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)