Beyond Gideon
Justice Black's majority opinion left many questions unanswered, such as whether Gideon would apply to all criminal cases or just felonies, and whether it would be retroactive or not. Many of these issues were clarified in later cases.
Miranda v. Arizona (1966): "Prosecutors could not use statements stemming from custodial interrogation of defendants unless they demonstrated the use of procedural safeguards . . . including warnings of the right to remain silent and the right to have counsel present during interrogations." [1]
Burget v. Texas (1967): Gideon should be applied retroactively. Bruce Jacob explains: "This meant that 4,300 or so inmates in Florida were sent back to the trial court for new trial or were released from custody. Other states that had not automatically provided counsel to indigents also had to retry or release the inmates who had not received the benefit of counsel." [2]
Argersinger v. Hamlin (1972): court-appointed counsel is a right even with misdemeanors.
Scott v. Illinois (1979): counsel is only a right in cases that could result in imprisonment, not in cases punishable only by fines or community service.
Strickland v. Washington (1984): From Majority Opinion: "The Sixth Amendment right to counsel is the right to the effective assistance of counsel, and the benchmark for judging any claim of ineffectiveness must be whether counsel's conduct so undermined the proper functioning of the adversarial process that the trial cannot be relied on as having produced a just result." [3]
Gideon is the only decision ever cited by the Supreme Court as an example of the kind of watershed rule of criminal procedure that so implicates fundamental fairness as to require retroactive application in habeas corpus. |
"If an obscure Florida convict named Clarence Earl Gideon had not sat down in his prison cell with a pencil and paper to write a letter to the Supreme Court, . . . the vast machinery of American Law would have gone on functioning undisturbed." -Robert F. Kennedy [4] the application of a legal decision to previous cases; for Gideon, this meant indigents convicted before the decision could be retried with an attorney |
- 1. "Miranda v. Arizona," The Oyez Project, accessed May 19, 2014.
- 2. Bruce R. Jacob, "Memories of and Reflections about Gideon v. Wainwright," Stetson Law Review XXXIII (2003): 254.
- 3. Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, (1984).
- 4. Robert F. Kennedy (speech, New England Conference on the Defense of Indigent Persons Accused, Parker House, Boston, November 1, 1963).
- 5. John H. Blume and Sheri Lynn Johnson, "Gideon Exceptionalism?," Yale Law Journal 122, no. 8 (June 2013): 2131.
- 6. Ernesto Miranda Talking with Attorney, photograph, February 15, 1967, U1546924, Bettmann Collection, Corbis Images, Phoenix, AZ.