How a destitute prisoner’s handwritten letter to the Supreme
Court made history Gideon’s Trumpet. By Anthony Lewis. Vintage,
288 pp., $15, paperback. By Janice Harayda None of the rights of
a defendant is more pervasive than the right to have a lawyer, a
judge once said, “for it affects his ability to assert any other
rights he may have.” The accused won this vital safeguard in
Gideon v. Wainwright, a landmark Supreme Court case that had one
of the unlikeliest beginnings in American legal history. Fifty
years ago a poor, indignant prisoner in Florida wrote a letter
to the U.S. Supreme Court – in pencil, on lined prison paper –
saying that he had been denied the right to a lawyer when
convicted. The court agreed to hear his case and held that the
Constitution required the government to provide counsel in all
serious criminal cases for defendants too poor to afford one.
Clarence Earl Gideon won the right to a new trial, this time
with a lawyer, and a jury acquitted him in just over an hour.
Anthony Lewis’ story