On Friday, March 15, the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court Decision in Gideon V. Wainwright was celebrated. Attorney General Eric Holder delivered a speech outining the progressmade since the landmark decision and the progress that must be made for toward guaranteeing citizens’ liberty interests.
Holder said the anniversary “marks a unique opportunity to remind professionals from across our nation’s legal community about the sacred responsibilities that every one of us shares. It provides a chance to call attention to the needs that we all must fulfill – and the challenges that prosecutors, public defenders, and policymakers throughout the country are called to address.
Gideon, who had been too poor to hire a lawyer when he was accused of theft in 1961, was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison.
Holder said that Gideon’s “journey that led to this momentous decision began quite humbly – with an act as simple as it was profoundly optimistic. In 1961, a poor drifter named Clarence Earl Gideon was arrested in Florida on charges of theft. He was forced to conduct his own defense, after his request for a court-appointed attorney was denied. After a jury found him guilty – and even after his petition to the Florida Supreme Court was turned away – he remained undeterred. He drafted another petition – in pencil, on prison stationery. And he addressed it to the United States Supreme Court.
In this extraordinary document – which is on display for this event here at the Department, just a short distance from my office on the fifth floor – Clarence Earl Gideon appealed to the principles of fairness and equality that have always defined our justice system and stood at the core of our identity as a nation,” said Holder.
Gideon wrote in his reply brief, “It makes no difference how old I am or what color I am or what church I belong too if any. The question is I did not get a fair trial. The question is very simple. I requested the court to appoint me [an] attorney and the court refused.”
In June of 1962, the Supreme Court granted Gideon’s petition.
Holder told th audience, “Meanwhile, the Florida Attorney General’s office began reaching out to its 49 counterparts – asking for their support as it prepared to argue the other side of the case. But this strategy backfired when Minnesota’s Attorney General – a young man named Walter Mondale, who was only a few years out of law school – strongly disagreed with Florida’s position.
Thanks largely to then-Attorney General Mondale’s advocacy – a total of 22 states signed on to an amicus brief in support of Clarence Earl Gideon. Only two submitted a brief supporting Florida. And on March 18, 1963 – when the Supreme Court unanimously held that Gideon’s right to due process had been violated – the foundation of America’s legal system was forever altered.”
“Of course, the progress heralded by the Court’s opinion – and the sweeping changes it demanded from coast to coast – would not happen overnight. And they could never be handed down from the bench,” Holder said. “In many ways, this decision would have to be put into action by the American people – and their state and local leaders.”
After the decision, Robert F. Kennedy said, “If an obscure Florida convict named Clarence Earl Gideon had not sat down in prison with a pencil and paper to write a letter to the Supreme Court; and if the Supreme Court had not taken the trouble to look at the merits in that one crude petition among all the bundles of mail it must receive every day, the vast machinery of American law would have gone on functioning undisturbed. But Gideon did write that letter; the court did look into his case; he was re-tried with the help of competent defense counsel; found not guilty and released from prison after two years of punishment for a crime he did not commit. And the whole course of legal history has been changed.”
However, according to D.C. Bar Conference, “study after study has shown over the past five years, the ideals of the Gideon decision and its progeny remain unmet, and thousands of people across the country go to jail every year without ever being competently defended or even talking to a lawyer.”
“It never has lived up to its promise,” Bruce Jacob, who as an assistant attorney general in Florida argued for the state in the Gideon case, says of the 1963 decision. “At the time it was decided, people thought, well, now the problem is solved. But that has not been true. Nearly 50 years later, it has not been solved at all…. The whole system is pretty awful right now. The Gideon case, the ideals that the Court announced have just not come close to being met.”
The book, Gideon’s Trumpet, based on the court case, became required reading in many high schools.