Volume 56, Number 16 · October 22, 2009
Go Directly to Jail
By Anthony Lewis
Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court
by Amy Bach
Metropolitan, 307 pp., $27.00
The court's decision in Gideon v. Wainwright has been a potent symbol of constitutional rights triumphant. Its holding, that the due process guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment entitles poor criminal defendants to free lawyers in state prosecutions, was all the more appealing because of the romantic story behind it. A powerless Florida prisoner, Clarence Earl Gideon, wrote a letter to the Supreme Court in pencil complaining that he had been tried and convicted without a lawyer. The Court reconsidered earlier cases that had rejected the claim that poor defendants had a right to counsel. When Gideon was retried after the decision, this time with a lawyer, he was acquitted.[1]
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