Personal Interview Transcript
Louie L. Wainwright, Director of Florida Department of Corrections, 1962-1987
"I didn’t realize how significant [the case] would be, but the former member of the Supreme Court was representing me in the Court [sic], and of course the reason I was named was because I was the agency head. The person ahead of me was named [case was originally Gideon v. Cochran], he was the head, and of course when he retired, I became Secretary—or Director at the time—but I didn’t go to court at all. I was not involved in trying to defend the case but of course we had a very strong lawyer up there. Of course, we lost the case, and it’s been probably the most significant case in modern history as far as the Supreme Court is concerned in changing the criminal justice system.
"I was working for the Department [of Corrections] at Florida State Prison and I was not aware of the details of the case and didn’t get aware of them until after I took over. Of course, I became Director while the case was in progress, and whenever it was over I had to deal with it.
"I didn’t have to find out much about Mr. Gideon because he was just a prisoner in the system and he had to be retried, and of course he didn’t get to—he had an attorney at his hearing that he was retried at. He still came to the Department of Corrections to serve that time. It was a monumental task for the Department of Corrections because everybody in the Department who did not have an attorney at trial was eligible to file for one. And of course we had to transfer them to court and we didn’t have to transfer them back. We had to transfer them to court, and many of them were released, but many of them came back to the system, and there were several hundred that had the opportunity to go back to court.
"Well, the effects immediately was we had to make arrangements to get those people back to court as the different courts could handle them, because the courts were crowded. And we had to work them in, and they were in different locations. And of course we had to transfer the ones that they wanted back to court, and whenever the trial was over they would be transferred back to us by the sheriff.
"Well the media concurred in the decision so they naturally made it as difficult as they could for handling the people involved, and as I said, there were several hundred who had to go back to court. Many of them were released—found not guilty, or evidence was gone, they couldn’t convict them at the time—and others had their census mitigated to give them a lot less time. None of them got more time. It was a—I guess it took us almost a year to get them all out to court and get them retried. The thing that I noticed most was that of the several hundred we released, we got very few of them back. And I tried to use that as an example to get the legislature to reduce the requirements for long sentences for everybody.
"After the case was determined, the Courts had to comply with it, and therefore it changed the courts more than it changed us. We didn’t have much changing to do because the courts had to make sure they had an attorney at trial, and we didn’t have much involvement with reference to that type of effect. There was probably a lot of cases they would’ve tried that they didn’t try, but I don’t know that’s for sure. But I would think that the prosecution had to be more careful to have proper evidence and sufficient information to convict them with, since they were going to have an attorney representing them.
"I think it was proper. There’s so many people that don’t have financial ability to hire lawyers with high expenses, and it provides that [fades] They at least have an attorney, they may not have the best attorney in town, but they at least have an attorney, and they [the attorneys] have to meet the judicial guidelines to take them to court and convict [defend] them. The prosecutors had to be as I said more alert to make sure that there was sufficient evidence to convict them with."
- 1. Louie L. Wainwright, interview by the author, Westminster Oaks, Tallahassee, FL, March 10, 2014.
- 2. Ibid.