Word: counsel
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...state courts must enforce the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against "unreasonable searches and seizures" by excluding illegal evidence, thus forcing state and local police to use judge-approved warrants for the first time in U.S. history. The Gideon decision invoked the Sixth Amendment to establish the right to counsel of all indigents accused of felonies-a decision that may be held to apply to misdemeanor cases as well. In other recent cases, the Supreme Court has also extended to the states the Fifth Amendment guarantee against self-incrimination and the Sixth Amendment right of the accused to cross-examine...
...opening the jailhouse doors" to hundreds of prisoners whose convictions may be nullified retroactively. In an important decision last month (Linkletter v. Louisiana), the court answered much of the criticism by holding that retroactivity depends on each decision's purpose. When a ruling concerns the right to counsel, as in Gideon, it is likely to be made retroactive, because it raises new questions about the prisoner's actual guilt. By contrast, the court refused to make Mapp retroactive because that decision had what lawyers call the "prophylactic" purpose of deterring lawless police action in the future...
Many implications of the Supreme Court's decisions have yet to be resolved. The Gideon ruling raised an infinitely complex question: At what precise moment after his arrest is a suspect entitled to counsel? For federal defendants, this issue has been solved. In Mallory v. U.S. (1957), the Supreme Court emphasized that anyone under federal arrest must be taken "without unnecessary delay" before a U.S. commissioner for instruction on his rights to silence and counsel; admissions obtained during an excessive delay must be excluded. The 1964 Criminal Justice Act requires as well that all indigents must be assigned lawyers...
...court voided Chicago Laborer Danny Escobedo's murder confession because it was made after the police had refused to let him see his lawyer, who was actually waiting in the station house at the time. Though vaguely worded, the court's ruling indicated that the right to counsel begins when police start grilling a prime suspect-a plainly impractical proposition, declared dissenting Justice Byron White "unless police cars are equipped with public defenders...
Because 75% to 80% of all convictions for serious crimes are based on presumably voluntary confessions, police and prosecutors have been in a tailspin ever since. Does Escobedo apply only to precisely similar situations? Or does it mean that police failure to advise a suspect of his rights to counsel and to silence automatically invalidates his confession? If interrogation requires the physical presence of a lawyer, will he not obviously advise his client to say nothing? Worried police officers now fear that as a result even valid confessions will be virtually eliminated. The Supreme Court has let 13 months pass...