It is well understood in today’s society that every person charged with a crime is entitled to the counsel of an attorney, regardless if the defendant can afford an attorney or not. Prior to the landmark decision of Gideon v Wainwright (1963), indigent defendants charged in state courts were not guaranteed the right to counsel. In 1942, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the appointment of counsel is not a “fundamental right,” and, therefore, is not essential to a fair trial in ¬Betts v. Brady (1942). The Betts reasoning, while stating that Betts’ case was fundamentally fair, created a special circumstances rule. If the courts found that a defendant was at a serious disadvantage, possibly because of the defendant’s lack of intelligence,
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Public defense can vary greatly in one state alone, especially when that state may have many different public defender agencies. This leads to the thinning of resources, including financial, the third issue at hand. Arguably, if there were fifty states public defender associations, which by agreement, shared resources and buying power, they could theoretically contract for daily operating costs, fingerprint analysis, DNA analysis, investigations, and training. The fact that our state, and many other states, has so many smaller county defender programs that rely heavily on county tax dollars, leads to the possibility of unequitable defense for the indigent. Theoretically, a capital defense case could easily surpass the county’s yearly budget for all defense cases. It is understandable, how a federally mandated state system could absorb the cost of such a defense, easily in the hundreds of thousands, better than a county system. In fact, this is the case in non-capital cases as well, in “Gideon’s Army, public defender Travis Williams has to “trick” the prosecution into analyzing the fingerprint evidence, by moving to exclude the fingerprint evidence, as his department could not have paid for such analysis. As Justice Black so bluntly wrote “Governments, both state and federal, quite properly spend vast sums of money…to try defendants accused of crime” and “that any defendant with means will hire the best lawyer they can to defend them (Gideon v Wainwright (1963), Israel et al., p. 321). This reasoning led to the court’s unanimous decision that indigent defendants have a “fundamental and essential” right to counsel (Gideon v Wainwright (1963), Israel et al., p.
Public defense can vary greatly in one state alone, especially when that state may have many different public defender agencies. This leads to the thinning of resources, including financial, the third issue at hand. Arguably, if there were fifty states public defender associations, which by agreement, shared resources and buying power, they could theoretically contract for daily operating costs, fingerprint analysis, DNA analysis, investigations, and training. The fact that our state, and many other states, has so many smaller county defender programs that rely heavily on county tax dollars, leads to the possibility of unequitable defense for the indigent. Theoretically, a capital defense case could easily surpass the county’s yearly budget for all defense cases. It is understandable, how a federally mandated state system could absorb the cost of such a defense, easily in the hundreds of thousands, better than a county system. In fact, this is the case in non-capital cases as well, in “Gideon’s Army, public defender Travis Williams has to “trick” the prosecution into analyzing the fingerprint evidence, by moving to exclude the fingerprint evidence, as his department could not have paid for such analysis. As Justice Black so bluntly wrote “Governments, both state and federal, quite properly spend vast sums of money…to try defendants accused of crime” and “that any defendant with means will hire the best lawyer they can to defend them (Gideon v Wainwright (1963), Israel et al., p. 321). This reasoning led to the court’s unanimous decision that indigent defendants have a “fundamental and essential” right to counsel (Gideon v Wainwright (1963), Israel et al., p.