ACSBlog

by Heejin Hwang

“Clarence Earl Gideon, defend yourself.” With those words fifty years ago, Abe Fortas, who represented Clarence Gideon’s appeal in front of the Supreme Court, highlighted the isolating circumstances regularly faced by indigent defendants without representation. But upon its unanimous ruling in Gideon v. Wainwright, the Supreme Court foundthat all citizens -- rich or poor -- were constitutionally guaranteed a right to counsel, declaring that no one facing criminal charges would have to navigate the legal system alone.

As we commemorate the legacy of Gideon this week, however, our criminal justice system continues to abandon defendants, and defenders, alike. Delivering one of the keynotes at ACS’s inaugural Student Convention in early March, Stephen Bright, President and General Counsel of the Southern Center for Human Rights, spoke of his clients’ hopelessness. For example, he noted the people with cases before the Texas Supreme Court, 92 percent of them do not have a lawyer.  One homeless woman on trial, Bright said, chose to go to jail, because at least then she would be fed and “sheltered.”

As noted yesterday during a national ACS symposium on Gideon several experts said too many states have proven obstacles to ensuring Gideon’s promise. Recently, Attorney General Eric Holder declared that “America’s indigent defense systems exist in a state of crisis” and announced $1.8 million in funding to “improve access to criminal legal services and strengthen indigent defense across the nation.” This is promising, but more action is needed to ensure that states are aware of the funding and spend it appropriately. From 2005 to 2010, the Department of Justice administered 13 grant programs to support indigent defense systems; yet, a 2012 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report stated that “among the 9 grants …, two-thirds or more of state, local, and tribal respondents … reported that they did not use these funds for the specified purpose, due to competing priorities.” Moreover, “no more than 54 percent of grantees or public defender offices responding to GAO’s surveys were aware that such funding could be used to support indigent defense.”

ACS’s inaugural Student Convention brought together nearly 200 law students from across the country and focused on the state of indigent defense 50 years after Gideon.  Speakers and practitioners celebrated the landmark case but also took an unabashedly introspective look at themselves, rallying their colleagues to take their constitutional responsibility more seriously.

by Greg Lukianoff, an attorney and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

I went to law school with a particular passion in mind: the First Amendment and freedom of speech. Starting at Stanford in 1997, I took virtually every class the law school offered on the First Amendment, completed six additional credits on the origins of the legal theory of “prior restraint” in Tudor England, and worked for the ACLU of Northern California. I was nonetheless unprepared for the kind of censorship I would see on college campuses, first as legal director and then as president of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education(FIRE).

My recent book, Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, is my attempt to catalog a small fraction of the terrible cases I’ve seen over the last 11 years and to explain why college censorship matters both on and off campus.

The cases of censorship I have seen over the years run from the absurd to the serious. I have covered these cases in great detail at The Huffington Post, where I’m a regular contributor, and have for the past two years dubbed some of the offenders the “worst colleges for freedom of speech.” On the high-end of the absurd cases are those involving cartoons, one case involving a quote from the beloved yet short-lived science-fiction series, Firefly, and a politically incorrect flyer that made a joke about the freshman 15, all of which I showcased in an article with the tongue-in-cheek name “Top 10 Pics Too Hot for Campus.”

I open Unlearning Liberty talking about the currently ongoing legal saga that straddles the chasm between absurd and serious. The case involved a student, Hayden Barnes, who protested against his school, Valdosta State University in southern Georgia, for its decision to build two parking garages on campus. He went about protesting the parking garages by contacting the Board of Regents and writing a letter to the editor of the student newspaper.