Criminal Justice

by Jeremy Leaming

It’s been 50 years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that criminal defendants have a constitutional right to counsel even if they cannot afford it. But too many states have not lived up to their constitutional obligation of ensuring that indigent defendants have counsel, helping lead to mass incarceration.

A new report from the Brennan Center For Justice explains that the states’ woefully ineffective handling of indigent defense cases has led to mass incarceration that is far more costly than providing adequate counsel to poor defendants. The report also provides suggestions for reforming the system.

In Gideon at 50: Three Reforms to Revive the Right to Counsel it is noted that at the time the high court down Gideon v. Wainwright in 1963 there were about 217,000 people in prison. “Today, the incarcerated population has expanded to approximately 2.3 million people. The United States has only 5 percent of the world’s population, but 25 percent of its prison population. One in four American adults now has been convicted of a crime. We live in an era of mass incarceration,” the report states.

If Gideon’s promise were being met, then it is likely the country could more easily overcome the crisis of mass imprisonment.

“Our poorly funded public defense system exacerbates our nation’s mass incarceration problem,” the Brennan report continues. “Rarely does the accused have adequate legal representation. Rarely is their fight balanced. Rarely do public defenders have the resources they need to keep Gideon’s promise of providing a constitutional right to effective counsel.”

The report makes a strong case that it would be a far more effective use of public dollars to help ensure indigent defendants have competent, adequate counsel instead of continuing to support a mass incarceration system that is incredibly costly and harmful to minority communities.

First, the report notes that mass imprisonment largely targets minority communities. “African-American and Hispanics, who make up less than 30 percent of the country’s population, are nearly 60 percent of the prison population. Whites, with 64 percent of the general population, make up approximately 35 percent of the prison population.”

by Stephen B. Bright and Sia M. Sanneh. Bright teaches at Yale Law School and is President and Senior Counsel of The Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta. Sanneh is the Senior Liman Fellow at Yale Law School and an attorney with the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama. 

Exactly 50 years ago, in Gideon v. Wainwright, the Supreme Court declared the right to a lawyer “fundamental and essential” to fairness in the criminal courts and held that lawyers must be provided for people who could not afford them so that every person “stands equal before the law.” In later decisions, the Court ruled that a poor person facing any loss of liberty must have a lawyer “so that the accused may know precisely what he is doing, so that he is fully aware of the prospect of going to jail or prison, and so that he is treated fairly by the prosecution.”And yet, a half century later this right is violated every day in thousands of courts across the nation, at every stage of the process.

In our forthcoming essay, Fifty Years of Defiance and Resistance After Gideon v. Wainwright, to be published in the Yale Law Journal, we chronicle the day-to-day denial of counsel in counties throughout the country; the refusal of governments to provide adequate funding for lawyers for the people they seek to convict, fine, imprison and execute; the complicity of judges in the denial of counsel; the enormous and unchecked power of prosecutors to decide cases, including sentences, often with little or no input from defense counsel; and the Supreme Court’s decision to paper over and ignore violations of the right to counsel instead of correcting them.

As we argue in our essay:

The cost of this one-sided system is enormous. Innocent people are convicted and sent to prison while the perpetrators remain at large. Important issues, such as the system’s pervasive racism—from stops by law enforcement officers to disparate sentencing—are ignored. People are sentenced without consideration of their individual characteristics, allowing race, politics, and other improper factors to influence sentences. Over 2.2 million people—a grossly disproportionate number of them African Americans and Latinos—are in prisons and jails at a cost of $75 billion a year. Nearly an additional five million people are on probation, parole, or supervised release. Over seventy thousand children are held in juvenile facilities. Even those who have completed their sentences may be deported, denied the right to vote, dishonorably discharged from the Armed Forces, denied public benefits, and denied business or professional licenses. Reentry into society is extremely difficult, extending the costs to the families and communities of those who have been imprisoned.

There are expressive costs as well. A system in which all of the key actors routinely ignore one of its most fundamental constitutional requirements is not a system based on the rule of law, no matter what it claims to be. When those actors shirk their constitutional obligations and bring the immense power of the state down most heavily on African Americans and Latinos, people cease to have confidence in the courts. The system lacks legitimacy and credibility and is undeserving of respect. For this to change, courts, legislatures, executives, and members of the legal profession will need to respond with a sense of urgency and commitment to justice that has been missing in most places during the last fifty years.