How Gideon's case reached the Supreme Court · Grades 10–12

The passage and its 7 questions

Directions: Read the passage carefully. Then answer the questions in full sentences.

• In 1961 police in Panama City, Florida, arrested Clarence Earl Gideon and charged him with breaking into a pool hall to steal. Gideon was poor, and he asked the judge to appoint a lawyer for him. The judge refused. Under Florida law at the time, courts provided free lawyers only to defendants facing the death penalty. Gideon had to defend himself. He questioned witnesses and made his own arguments, but the jury convicted him, and he was sentenced to five years in prison.
• Most cases end there. A person who loses at trial can appeal to a higher court, but appeals usually focus on whether the law was applied correctly, not on retrying the facts. From his prison cell, Gideon asked the Florida Supreme Court to free him, arguing that he had been denied his constitutional right to a lawyer. When that court turned him down, he wrote a petition to the Supreme Court of the United States, in pencil, on prison paper.
• The Supreme Court receives thousands of petitions each year and agrees to hear only a small fraction of them. It grants a writ of certiorari when at least four of the nine justices vote to take a case, usually one that raises an important question of law or settles disagreement among lower courts. Gideon's petition raised exactly such a question. In
• 1942, in Betts v. Brady, the Court had ruled that states did not always have to provide lawyers to poor defendants. Some justices were ready to reconsider.
• The Court agreed to hear the case and appointed a prominent Washington lawyer, Abe
• Fortas, to argue for Gideon without pay. Both sides filed written briefs, and other parties filed friend-of-the-court briefs; twenty-two states urged the Court to require lawyers for poor defendants. In January 1963 the lawyers presented oral arguments and answered the justices' questions.
• On March 18, 1963, the Court ruled unanimously for Gideon. Justice Hugo Black wrote that the right to counsel in the Sixth Amendment is fundamental to a fair trial and applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause. The
• Court overruled Betts v. Brady.
• The ruling did not set Gideon free; it gave him a new trial. This time a lawyer represented him, questioned the witnesses closely and exposed weaknesses in the case against him. The jury found Gideon not guilty. Across the country, states created or expanded public defender systems so that people who cannot afford a lawyer would have one.
• 1. Why did the trial judge refuse to appoint a lawyer for Gideon?
• 2. What must happen for the Supreme Court to agree to hear a case?
• 3. Why was Gideon's petition a strong candidate for the Court to hear?
• 4. What does 'overruled' mean in paragraph 5?
• 5. What were the effects of the decision, both for Gideon and for the country?
• 6. Copy the sentence that explains how the Sixth Amendment came to apply to the states.
• 7. Explain how the passage connects to a current issue or another text you know.