The Supreme Court and the right to counsel.

Abstract

The constitutional issue of the right to counsel for persons accused of criminal offenses in American courts has its origins in colonial America and has experienced a long evolutionary period of development. Through a close look at Supreme Court opinions spanning most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we are able to observe the reasons for this transformation. The right to counsel issue in American courts has primarily focused On the question of appointment of counsel for the indigent defendant and not on an individual's right to be heard by counsel privately obtained. Since the early history of the Republic was greatly influenced by the principle of federalism, it is understandable that the right to counsel doctrine in state courts was considered fundamentally a state matter. As a result, the doctrine followed various forms of development on the state level until the Supreme Court saw its way clear to begin a gradual imposition of a more uniform standard in the 1932 case of Powell v. Alabama. This new approach was made constitutionally appropriate through the application of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment which the Court held to guarantee the indigent the right to counsel in all capital cases. After Powell the Court would eventually extend the right of counsel to the indigent in all cases where a prison sentence was imposed. The gradual change, which took the Court through several stages and included such landmark cases as Betts v. Brady, Gideon v. Wainwright, and Argersinger v. Hamlin, seems to have been facilitated by the overall change in societal attitudes toward the indigent and the fundamental right to a fair trial.