Gideon v Wainwright at 50: Right to Counsel for the Poor Remains an Illusion

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from “Fifty Years of Defiance and Resistance After Gideon v. Wainwright” by  Stephen Bright, President and Senior Counsel at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta and Sia Sanneh, an attorney with the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, forthcoming Yale Law Journal:

Every day in thousands of courtrooms across the nation, from top-tier trial courts that handle felony cases to municipal courts that serve as cash cows for their communities, the right to counsel is violated. Judges conduct hearings in which poor people accused of crimes and poor children charged with acts of delinquency appear without lawyers. Many plead guilty without lawyers. Others plead guilty and are sentenced after learning about plea offers from lawyers they met moments before and will never see again. Innocent people plead guilty to get out of jail. Virtually all cases are resolved in this manner in many courts, particularly municipal and misdemeanor courts, which handle an enormous volume of cases. But it is also how many felony cases are resolved.

Even when representation lasts for more than a few minutes, it is often provided by lawyers struggling with enormous caseloads, who practice triage as they attempt to represent more people than is humanly—and ethically—possible without the resources to investigate their many clients’ cases, retain expert witnesses, and pay other necessary expenses. As a result, they are unable to give their clients informed, professional advice during plea negotiations, which resolve almost all cases in “a system of pleas, not a system of trials.”3 In the rare case that goes to trial, defense counsel often cannot seriously contest the prosecution’s arguments, raise and preserve legal issues for appeal, or provide information about the defendant that is essential for individualized sentencing. For the poor person accused of a crime, there may be no adversarial system. Prosecutors may determine outcomes in cases with little or no input from defense counsel.

See also: The Right to Counsel: Badly Battered at 50

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rOnsB2S5nJc

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