50 Years After Key Case, Problems Defending The Poor Persist
Next week marks the 50th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision in which the justices unanimously ruled that defendants facing substantial jail time deserved legal representation in state courts, even if they couldn't afford to pay for it.
The ruling came in the case of Clarence Earl Gideon, a drifter convicted of breaking and entering after he was forced to defend himself. His handwritten appeal made it to the high court, and the decision in his favor became a rallying cry for the idea of equal justice.
But a half-century after Gideon v. Wainwright, many lawyers say the system for providing defense attorneys for the poor is in crisis.
One of those lawyers is Norman Lefstein, who started working for poor criminal defendants in Washington, D.C., a few months after the Gideon ruling on March 18, 1963.
"It is a vital constitutional right," Lefstein says. "It distinguishes us as a country. I happen to believe that the quality of justice in our courts says a lot about the kind of society we are."
A Case's Consequences
Lefstein devoted his career to the idea that people facing jail or prison time need lawyers. But he's troubled by what he sees and hears today, like a call he got from a defense lawyer for poor people in a Northeastern state.
"In my judgment, his caseload was absurd," says Lefstein, who's written widely on indigent defense issues. "I mean, just try to imagine simultaneously representing competently over 300 clients. And he was in an impossible situation."
Those caseloads can have some pretty bad consequences, says University of Georgia law professor Erica Hashimoto.
"There are a lot of stories of what are called meet 'em and plead 'em lawyers — lawyers who show up at the courthouse and represent the defendant for about five minutes, where they tell the client, 'You have to plead guilty,' " Hashimoto says.
Before Hashimoto became a law professor, she was a federal public defender. Those programs — designed for the federal courts and paid for with federal money — generally work much better than the patchwork of state defense systems. But now, with across-the-board federal budget cuts and a $38 million shortfall, even those federal public defenders are taking a beating. Some are facing furloughs of up to a month or more.
“ We know that felony defendants in urban areas for the most part are represented by counsel. We don't know the same about felony defendants in rural areas, and we have virtually no information on misdemeanor defendants.