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:
“There are ... two minimum conditions necessary and sufficient for the existence of a legal system. On the one hand those rules of behavior which are valid according to the system’s ultimate criteria of validity must be generally obeyed, and on the other hand, its rules of recognition specifying the criteria of legal validity and its rules of change and adjudication must be effectively accepted as common public standards of official behavior by its officials.”
—H.L.A. (Herbert Lionel Adolphus)
“... every experience in life enriches one’s background and should teach valuable lessons.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)