Mr. Gideon was a poor man accused of theft. He represented himself because he couldn't afford a lawyer. He was convicted. He appealed to the Supreme Court on a handwritten letter from prison. The Court heard his case and held that poor people get court-appointed lawyers . . .
. . . he had a new trial with a local lawyer who understood how the false accusation happened. The lawyer did some investigating, presented facts that Gideon has been unable to obtain, and Gideon was acquitted.
Progress is hard because there is so much push back. This is a good example.
Conservatives never liked Gideon v. Wainwright. They don't think THEIR tax dollars should pay for the lawyers for poor people.
That's why this is a constant battle.
While I'm having a mini-rant, there is a stereotype I'd like to dispel.
Public defenders (at least where I've worked) are very good.
Many are idealistic lawyers who believe all people are entitled to good representation.
Sometimes you're better off with the public defender.
Being able to afford an airline ticket doesn't mean you can afford a lawyer. Stop.
You're lucky. You've never had to hire a private lawyer to defend you from a criminal investigation. The price would take your breath away.
If you have multiple parties in a constitutional democracy with a president, the president can come to power with 33% of the vote— or less if the vote is split multiple ways.
Do you really want that?
A majority requires a big tent, which means compromising.
One consideration is the probability that the defendant will be convicted and face jail time because otherwise, you run the risk of ruining an innocent person's life.
(A jailed person probably loses his or her job. What if there are kids to support, etc.)
The goal of the GOP is to dismantle the federal government and return to that time (before 1920; for others, before 1860) when white men could basically do what they wanted.
On the frontier, they could grab land!
Before modern rape laws, they could grab women!
2/
Before the alphabet-soup regulatory agencies (the "deep state") they could cheat!
🔹They could fix prices and manipulate markets!
🔹They could sell rotten goods and it was the buyer's fault for not inspecting better!
🔹They could pollute rivers!
Our current criminal justice system took form after the Civil War, when the reactionaries and White Supremacists found a way around the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery except in the case of punishment for crimes after conviction. 1/
The solution: Convict lots of Black men, put them in jail, and put them in chain gangs. At the time, there were no limits on what police could do.
So they often beat confessions out of innocent Black men.
Along came Charles Hamilton and his protégé Thurgood Marshall.
2/
As a result of literally decades of work (and one of the few times we had a liberal Supreme Court under Earl Warren), we got rulings that the Fourth Amendment outlaws things like beating confessions out of people.