The Expansion of Constitutional Right to Counsel by the US Supreme Court - Who Pays?
According to the Sixth Amendment of the United States Constitution, "[i]n all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right . . . to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence." What isn’t provided in this constitutional mandate is how the defense lawyer’s fees and expenses are to be paid. The result of this financial myopia is a deepening financial crisis in Florida and across the country today.
Over time, the constitutional right to counsel provision has been reviewed and applied by both legislatures and courts – always with a resulting expansion of its application. For instance, a citizen’s right to legal representation in federal proceedings was initially set by statute and then approved by the U.S. Supreme Court in Johnson v. Zerbst, 304 U.S. 658 (1938), when our country was still suffering through the Great Depression. State courts were a different story, however.
Until the early twentieth century, those who could not afford to pay for their own criminal defense attorneys in state matters were dependent upon the local bar’s pro bono efforts. Individual attorneys made their own personal decisions on their commitments of time and expense in representing the poor. Legal Aid? Public Defender? These terms were not known in this country before World War II (unless you looked at a select few metropolises like New York City, where a legal aid organization had been in operation since the late 1800s).
Of course, historically this dovetails with an attitude that the practice of law was a “profession” not a “business,” where it was part of the profession’s honor and duty to undertake pro bono cases in their local area. Today, we no longer turn a blind eye to the realities of a law practice operating as a business concern. What was at one time a stigma – that lawyers work for a profit -- is an attitude that has not stood the test of time.
Expansion of the Right to Counsel into State Courts – first, the felonies
As the highest court in the land, the U.S. Supreme Court slowly began to hear cases coming before it that dealt with these state court situations, where state statutes did not require the particular state to provide a criminal defense counsel for the defendant. While the nation was still reeling in the Great Depression, the High Court heard Powell v. Alabama, 287 U.S. 45 (1932) and held that states had to provide legal counsel to indigents in all state cases where capital punishment was at issue.
Having defined who would be covered by the right to counsel, the High Court also considered cases that delved into the issue of when the right to counsel would start to apply in a particular case. Seeing justice as a poor person having the right to a lawyer long before he came before a judge, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a series of opinions in the mid-twentieth century that covered the indigent citizen almost from the moment that he or she first came into contact with law enforcement authorities, all the way to the point that he or she might theoretically be setting before the U.S. Supreme Court itself.
