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Remembering 1963: Echoes remain from 'Gideon's Trumpet'

Joan Baez and Bob Dylan at the March on Washington; The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the same day, Aug. 28, 1963, delivers the "I Have a Dream Speech"; President John F. Kennedy addresses the nation on civil rights, June 11, 1963; Alabama Gov. Georg
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This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 28, 2013: Clarence Earl Gideon is buried at his birthplace of Hannibal, Mo., with an eloquent epitaph on his tombstone.

“Each era finds an improvement in law for the benefit of mankind,” it reads.

Gideon’s era was 50 years ago this month when a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court recognized the constitutional right of a poor person to a lawyer. The case was Gideon v. Wainwright.

The epitaph is from a prophetic letter that Gideon wrote to his court-appointed lawyer, Abe Fortas, the noted Washington lawyer who went on to become a Supreme Court justice.

Even though Gideon was uneducated and pretty much a career criminal for the early part of his life, he had a powerful simplicity in his writing.

“I have no illusions about law and courts or the people who are involved in them,” he wrote to Fortas. “I have read the complete history of law ever since the Romans first started writing them down and before of the laws of religions. I believe that each era finds a improvement in law each year brings something new for the benefit of mankind. Maybe this will be one of those small steps forward.”

Anthony Lewis, the New York Times Supreme Court expert, ensured that the public would remember the importance and sweep of the court’s decision in his book, “Gideon’s Trumpet.”  Lewis died this month, half a century after the decision he popularized.

Learning the hard way

One wouldn’t expect this uneducated son of a cobbler to be associated with a majestic advance in criminal justice.

Gideon’s mother asked juvenile authorities to lock him up before he was 16 and they complied. There was no court-appointed lawyer in those pre-Gideon days.

During the '30s and '40s, Gideon was pretty much of a career criminal, “excaping,“ as he put it, from local jails and spending much of the time in the Missouri Penitentiary. But by the time he was arrested for burglarizing the Bay Harbor Poolroom in Panama City in 1961, he had pretty much aged out of his life of crime.

His experience had taught him the importance of having a lawyer and he asked for one, but was turned down.

Gideon’s five-page handwritten “pauper’s” petition of appeal got the attention of the Supreme Court. He wrote: "It makes no difference how old I am or what color I am or what church I belong too if any. The question is I did not get a fair trial. The question is very simple. I requested the court to appoint me attorney and the court refused. All countrys try to give there Citizens a fair trial and see to it that they have counsel."

The Supreme Court agreed. It ruled unanimously that “in our adversary system of criminal justice, any person hauled into court, who is too poor to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him.”

…Juveniles

The court extended the right to counsel to juveniles in the 1967 decision of in re Gault, where a young man was locked up for making a nasty phone call even though his family was not notified of the arrest and detention.

… Misdemeanors

Then in 1972 the court extended Gideon to people accused of misdemeanors that could involve time in jail, Argersinger v. Hamlin

…Legal Services

The Gideon ruling always was limited to criminal cases, with legal help for civil cases provided by the Legal Services Corp., which was established in 1974.  Legal Services was often quite effective, sometimes too effective, raising the ire of local and national politicians, including former Missouri Gov. Warren Hearnes in the 1960s and Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and 80s.

President Reagan, shortly after his election, attempted to kill the Legal Services Corp. But moderate Republicans, such as F. William McCalpin in St. Louis, joined with Democrats to save it.  In intervening decades, however, its funding has often been considered inadequate.

On the 40th anniversary of Gideon in 2003, the ABA conducted interviews in almost half of the states to determine its vitality. It came to the “inescapable conclusion that, 40 years after Gideon, the promise of equal justice for the poor remains unfulfilled in this country.”

… No more minor crimes

By 1979, however, the political complexion of the court had changed and, in a shoplifting case from Cook County Illinois, Scott v. Illinois, the court said a person accused of a minor crime was not entitled to a lawyer if the violation did not involve prison time, even if it was authorized but was not imposed.

…Public defenders

Public defender programs (an outgrowth of Gideon) may be underfunded in some states, including Missouri – a claim contested by prosecutors such as St. Louis County’s Bob McCulloch.

In 2008, the Public Defender Commission in Missouri set a cap on the number of cases each local office takes on, allowing some offices to turn away indigent defendants. The Missouri Supreme Court ruled last year that the practice was permissible. Since then, the& State Public Defender System has placed 31 offices on limited availability, including St. Louis.

Cat Kelly, director of Missouri's defender system, recently told the Kansas City Star that the public defender’s system was like the "I Love Lucy" episode with candy flying down the conveyor belt without enough workers to package it. There aren’t enough public defenders to represent all of the poor people who need defending, she said.

Gideon’s case illustrated the importance of the right to counsel. In his first trial, without a lawyer, he was found guilty by the jury and sentenced to prison. In the second, after the Supreme Court decision and with a lawyer, a jury found him innocent after one hour’s deliberation.

Gideon died in 1972. His body was buried in an unmarked grave in Hannibal. In 1984, the ACLU of Eastern Missouri provided the tombstone with the epitaph from his famous letter to Fortas.

1963

During the next several months, we’ll look back and point to events today that have only a few degrees of separation from the big moments of 1963. It’s one way to help us connect the dots and understand how we got where we are.

William H. Freivogel is a professor in the Southern Illinois University's School of Journalism, a contributor to St. Louis Public Radio and publisher of the Gateway Journalism Review.