Clarence Earl Gideon
| Clarence Earl Gideon | |
|---|---|
Clarence Earl Gideon, circa 1961
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| Born |
August 30, 1910 Hannibal, Missouri |
| Died | January 18, 1972 (aged 61) Fort Lauderdale, Florida |
| Criminal penalty | multiple sentences |
| Conviction(s) | robbery, burglary, larceny, theft (multiple) |
Clarence Earl Gideon (August 30, 1910 – January 18, 1972) was a poor drifter accused in a Florida state court of felony theft. His case resulted in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Gideon v. Wainwright, holding that a criminal defendant who cannot afford to hire a lawyer must be provided with a lawyer at no cost. At Gideon's first trial, he represented himself, and he was convicted. After the Supreme Court ruled that the state had to provide defense counsel for the indigent, Florida retried Gideon. At his second trial, which took place in August 1963 with a lawyer representing him and bringing out for the jury the weaknesses in the prosecution's case, Gideon was acquitted.
On June 3, 1961, $5 in change and a few bottles of beer and soda were stolen from the Pool Room, a pool hall/beer joint that belonged to Ira Strickland, Jr. Strickland also alleged that $50 was taken from the jukebox. Henry Cook, a 22-year-old resident who lived nearby, told the police that he had seen Gideon walk out of the joint with a bottle of wine and his pockets filled with coins, and then got into a cab and left. Gideon was arrested in a tavern.
Being too poor to pay for counsel, Gideon was forced to defend himself at his trial after being denied a lawyer by his trial judge, Robert McCrary, Jr.. On August 4, 1961, Gideon was tried and convicted of breaking and entering with intent to commit petty larceny, and on August 25, Gideon was given the maximum sentence by Judge McCrary, which was five years in prison.
Gideon, then in jail, studied the American legal system and came to the conclusion that Judge McCrary had violated his constitutional right to counsel under the Sixth Amendment, applicable to the State of Florida through the due process clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. He then wrote to an FBI office in Florida and next to the Florida Supreme Court, but was denied help. Then in January 1962, he mailed a five-page petition (petition for writ of certiorari) to the Supreme Court of the United States asking the nine justices to consider his complaint. The Supreme Court, in reply, agreed to hear his appeal. Originally, the case was called Gideon v. Cochran and was argued on January 15, 1963. Abe Fortas was assigned to represent Gideon. Bruce Jacob, the Florida Attorney General, was assigned to argue against Gideon. Fortas argued that a common man with no training in law could not go up against a trained lawyer and win, and that "you cannot have a fair trial without counsel." Jacob argued that the issue at hand was a state issue, not federal; the practice of only appointing counsel under "special circumstances" in non-capital cases sufficed; that thousands of convictions would have to be thrown out if it were changed; and that Florida had followed for 21 years "in good faith" the 1942 Supreme Court ruling in Betts v. Brady. (The case's original title, Gideon v. Cochran, was changed to Gideon v. Wainwright after Louie L. Wainwright replaced H. G. Cochran as the director of the Florida Division of Corrections, a fact made known to the Supreme Court clerk by Jacob).
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