On Behalf of Fairness
In 1963 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in the case of Gideon vs. Wainwright that an indigent defendant charged with a crime for which he could be jailed was entitled to be represented by a lawyer at state expense. The requirement is so elementary and so consistent with this country’s ideal of fairness that it is hard to understand how it took nearly two centuries for it to become law.
Last week the Supreme Court extended the Gideon decision, and ruled that if sanity is at issue an indigent defendant must be provided with a psychiatrist to assist in his defense. “A criminal trial is fundamentally unfair if the state proceeds against an indigent defendant without making certain that he has access to the raw materials integral to the building of an effective defense,” Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote for the majority in the 8-1 decision. More than 40 states and the federal government already provide psychiatrists to indigent defendants under certain circumstances, but the court’s ruling institutionalizes the practice and makes it uniform.
The decision and the sweeping additional guarantees that it implies are significant in their own right, recognizing and extending the court’s view that, as Marshall wrote, “justice cannot be equal where, simply as a result of his poverty, a defendant is denied the opportunity to participate meaningfully in a judicial proceeding in which his liberty is at stake.” The decision is also significant because it is the first time in several years that the court has broadened rather than narrowed the rights of criminal defendants.
The size of last week’s majority is an encouraging sign to those who fear that the court has blindly embarked on an ideologically conservative course. This was no 5-4 decision in which the majority held itself together by accommodation and compromise. Seven of the justices agreed with Marshall’s assertions of the right of all defendants to access to the “basic tools of an adequate defense or appeal.” Chief Justice Warren E. Burger issued a concurring opinion in which he said that he would have limited the right to a psychiatrist to capital cases like the one before the court.
Justice William H. Rehnquist cast the sole dissenting vote. “I do not think due process is violated merely because an indigent lacks sufficient funds to pursue a . . . defense as thoroughly as he would like,” Rehnquist wrote in his dissent. Fortunately, his view fell as far short of prevailing as is possible on the nation’s highest court.
