Word: gideon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Every day, as he ambles through the cobwebbed halls of the New Orleans criminal court building, public defender Richard Teissier feels he violates his clients' constitutional rights. The Sixth Amendment established, and the landmark Gideon Supreme Court case affirmed, the right of poor people to legal counsel. At any given moment, when Teissier is representing some 90 accused murderers, rapists and robbers, his office has no money to hire experts or track down witnesses; its law library consists of a set of lawbooks spirited away from a dead judge's chambers...
...declared the state's indigent-defense system unconstitutional. The ruling is now on appeal before the Louisiana Supreme Court. "This is a test of whether there is justice in the United States," Teissier says. "If you're only going to pay it lip service then get rid of Gideon...
Thirty years ago last week, the Supreme Court unanimously voted in favor of Clarence Earl Gideon, an uneducated gambler and petty thief who insisted on his right to legal counsel. "Any person haled into court who is too poor to hire a lawyer cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him," wrote Justice Hugo Black. "This seems to us to be an obvious truth." Over the next two decades the court expanded the protection to apply to all criminal cases and stressed that the representation must be "effective." But today, as defenders of indigents handle...
...didn't have a mission in writing Gideon. I wrote Gideon because I was covering the Supreme court for the New York Times and the president of Random House, Bob Bernstein, pressed me, and pressed me, and pressed me, to write a book about the Supreme Court. And as I said earlier, I don't think books on a generalized topic are worthwhile; at least, I don't want to write them...
...then he said to me, well maybe you'd like to write a children's book, we could use a children's book. And when the Gideon case came along, and I read [Gideon's] letter, I thought this would make a good beginning for the children's book, and I began looking into it, and it just turned into the book. There wasn't any sort of calculation about my mission to educate the American public...