Word: gideons
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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...
...Crimson recently spoke with Anthony Lewis, The New York Times Supreme Court reporter from 1957-64 and the author of Gideon's Trumpet and Make No Law, books which describe landmark Supreme Court cases. Excerpts from that conversation follow...
...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...
...been unable to overcome the political infighting and finger pointing that have bogged down attempts to find a solution. Last week Sharon was rebuffed by Israel's Supreme Court, which ruled against his plan to circumvent the parliament. And he was dealt another setback when Minister of Tourism Gideon Patt rejected a plan to use hotels, youth hostels and army camps for emergency shelters. Patt complained that such stopgap methods would help only 500 families, not the 7,000 a month who need housing...