[MUSIC] Clarence Earl Gideon had a pretty rough life. He was born in Missouri in 1910. His father died when he was three. He made it through the eighth grade in local schools, then he ran away from home. He drifted around for years, holding various jobs, marrying four times, and occasionally running into trouble with the law. In 1961, he was working as an electrician in Florida, and supplementing his income by gambling. That summer, someone broke into a pool room and stole money from a cash register. A witness said he'd seen Gideon leaving, so the police arrested him. And he was charged with breaking and entering. Gideon didn't have a lot of money so he couldn't afford a lawyer. And under the practice in Florida at that time, the state would only appoint a lawyer to defend you in a death penalty case. Or when there were special circumstances. So Gideon represented himself. Now, how do you think he is going to do in court? Criminal defense is complicated, not just because the law is complicated, but also because a trial lawyer has to know lots of rules about evidence and procedure. Gideon hasn't been to law school. He hasn't been to high school. You can see for yourself how unprepared he was. >> What says the defendant. Are you ready for trial? >> I'm not ready your honor. >> Gideon was flat broke. So broke he had spent the last two months here in the county jail because he couldn't even afford bail. There was no way he could pay for a lawyer. >> I have no council. >> Wait. Stop. Rewind. Okay. I know this is black and white film and bad acting but this is a turning point in our story. Sorry for interrupting but I didn't want you to miss it. >> I have no council. >> Why do you not have council? Do you know that your case is set to trial today? >> Your honor, I request this court to appoint council to represent me in this crowd. >> I'm sorry but I will have to deny your request to appoint council to defend you in this case. >> And it doesn' t go well from there. For possibly stealing a couple of dollars, Clarence Gideon gets convicted and sent to jail to serve five years But while he's in jail, Gideon starts reading something that's not so complicated, the US Constitution. The Constitution is written so that ordinary people can understand it and Gideon thinks he does. He thinks he understands the 6th amendment which says, that in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to have the assistance of counsel for his defense. And he thinks that when Florida tried him without giving him a lawyer it violated this right. The sixth amendment itself doesn't apply to the states remember but through the 14th amendment, it does. So Gideon writes a petition to the United States Supreme Court. He writes it in pencil on prison stationary. Among the thousands of petitions the Supreme Court receives every year, this is probably not the most impressive or the most professional, but it catches the Court's attention. They take the case and they rule in his favor, nine to zero. If the state wants to put you in jail the Court says, when your liberty is at stake, it has to give you a lawyer. So Gideon gets a new trial. He gets a lawyer this time. And the jury acquits him after only an hour of deliberation. That's one right you have under the 6th amendment, the right to a lawyer. There are some others in there which we're not going to focus on. They're basically similar in that they're designed to ensure a fair trial. So you have the right to be told what the charges against you are. Obviously you can't really defend yourself if you don't know. You have the right to confront the witnesses against you. So you can cross examine them. Make them say it to your face. And you have the right to bring people in to testify for you, even against their will. And then there's the right to trial by jury, which is the other right we are going to talk about a bit more. Let's talk a minute now about what these rights do. And about who they protect. The right to counsel and the right to a jury are similar in one way. They both work to ensure that the defendant isn't alone. It's not just you against the government. You get a lawyer who's on your side, who knows the system, and you get the jury. They aren't on your side, but they aren't on the government's side, either. They aren't career judges who have maybe become cynical after seeing hundreds of cases. They're your peers. They represent the people. As a whole, what the 6th amendment does is make trials more fair. It contributes to the accuracy of the verdict. So certainly these rights protect the innocent. They reduce mistaken convictions by quite a lot. They do also protect the guilty. When you give guilty people a lawyer, when you improve their ability to defend themselves, you make it more likely they'll be acquitted. Now we could say, anyone who's acquitted should have been. The state didn't prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. It doesn't matter if that person in fact committed the crime, acquittal is the right result. It's a good thing. And we could say that but not everyone would agree. The reason that we require proof beyond a reasonable doubt, presumably, is not that it's okay to commit a crime as long as it can't be proved. It's that when mistakes happen and they will, we want them to be on the side of acquitting guilty people and not convicting innocent ones. It's better to acquit two guilty people than to convict one innocent, said Voltaire. Ten said William Blackstone. A hundred, said Benjamin Franklin. And we can disagree about the right number. But there does seem to be a general idea that it's worse to convict the innocent than to acquit the guilty. Still, all that means is that the cost of mistake in acquittals is worth bearing. It doesn't mean it's not a cost, so we're still left with the idea that the 6th amendment still leads to more guilty people being acquitted. But this is not as true in practice as you might think. Court appointed lawyers don't usually get acquittals. They don't usually get trials. 90 to 95% of all cases end with a plea bargain and this is even more true for appointed lawyers. So the main thing the 6th amendment means in most cases, is that you have a lawyer to negotiate your plea bargain. With a plea bargain, the government says, we think you did something very bad and we're willing to go to court to try to prove that. But if you agree to admit that you did something slightly less bad, we won't have the trial. So it's an offer to you, accept the lesser charge, but don't contest it. Thus far, I've been talking about how the rights are similar. But I want to close by talking about a difference between them. What are fights over the right to a jury trial been about? With the right to counsel, it's been about what kinds of cases you get a lawyer for. So you might think that with the jury trial right, it's about what kind of cases you can insist on a jury for. And yes, that's part of it. But the more important struggle over the jury has been about who gets to serve. And the struggle there has paralleled the main civil rights movements of American history. First it's about race. Can blacks serve on juries? Then it's about sex. What about women? And now it's sexual orientation. Can they take you off a jury because you're gay or lesbian? And what this means is, that when we think about the jury right, we shouldn't think about this as just a right for the defendant. It's a right for the potential jurors too. A right to serve, to play a role in the administration of justice. To make sure that justice is administered with an even hand. This is a right that people should value, just like the other constitutional rights that Americans have struggled for, died for. Nowadays, sadly we often don't. People want to get out of jury service. They complain. They make up excuses. We should think about jury service as an honor. A chance to do something very important. A chance to protect equality. Because that's what the jury is really about. All jurors are equal. That's one thing. No matter who you are, what your day job is, or whether you have one at all. You're equal in that jury box, in that deliberation room. And that makes defendants equal, too. No one has to look at that jury and say, there's no one like me, no one who will understand me. >> Being involved with the process and seeing how it actually works is very interesting, and doing your civic duty is, I mean there is some pride in that. >> A democracy only works when people participate. So if they're not going to participate then what's the point of voting, of showing up, doing anything. >> It really knocks into the idea of democracy You feel like a real member of your community and that you are sitting in judgement on one of your peers instead of just one judge or some aristocrat or whatever deciding your fate. >> And that's why we need people to be willing to serve. For the system to be truly fair. For it to truly achieve justice, we need everyone on that jury, we need you. [MUSIC]
