Indigent Criminal Defense Research Guide

For most of U.S. history, the vast majority of state criminal defendants did not have the right to a court-appointed attorney. While the federal courts and several states did guarantee representation, several decisions from this era repeatedly confirmed that the states had no Constitutional obligation to pay for attorneys to represent indigent defendants.

• The Scottsboro Case (Powell v. Alabama, 287 US 45 (1932))
  One of the most important cases, and certainly the most infamous, of the pre-Gideon era was Powell v. Alabama. Powell involved the wrongful convictions of nine young African-American men accused of raping two white women on a freight train. The defendants could not afford representation, and only inadequate representation was provided by the state. Eight of the defendants were sentenced to death; the ninth to life in prison. After the first stage of trials, the Supreme Court reversed the convictions, holding that counsel must be provided in capital cases.
• • Scholarly Articles about Scottsboro
  • • N. Jeremi Duru, The Central Park Five, the Scottsboro Boys, and the Myth of the Bestial Black Man, 25 Cardozo L. Rev. 1315 (2003).
    • Matthew C. Heise, The Scottsboro Boys Trials and Judge Horton's Ex Parte Meeting: History's Verdict, 7 Dartmouth L.J. 208 (2009).
    • Douglas O. Linder, Without Fear or Favor: Judge James Edwin Horton and the Trial of the Scottsboro Boys, 68 UMKC L. Rev. 549 (1999).
    • William G. Ross, The Constitutional Significance of the Scottsboro Cases, 28 Cumb. L. Rev. 591 (1997).

• Original source documents relating to Scottsboro
• • Scottsboro Defense Committee Papers
    Collection of documents from committee, formed by the NAACP to assist the Scottsboro defendants.
  • Report on the Scottsboro, Ala. Case
    Contemporaneous account of the case produced by the ACLU.

• Books, movies, and other popular media about Scottsboro
• • Scottsboro: a Novel ( 1st ed ed. 2008) PS3572.I38 S36 2008 
  • Scottsboro: a Tragedy of the American South ( Rev. ed. 2007) KF224.S34 C3 2007
    ACLU History: Scottsboro Boys
  • Scottsboro: an American Tragedy KF224.S34 S36 2005 DVD Video
     

• Other Pre-Gideon Cases
• • Betts v. Brady, 316 U.S. 455 (1942)
    Betts specifically held that indigent state defendants did not have the right to court-provided counsel. Overruled by Gideon. 
  • Johnson v. Zerbst,304 U.S. 458 (1938)
    Verified the right to court-appointed counsel in federal, but not state, prosecutions.
  • Hamilton v. Alabama, 368 U.S. 52 (1961)
    Held that in a capital case, the right to counsel attaches at the time of arraignment.
     

• Scholarship on pre-Gideon law and history
• • William O. Douglas, Right To Counsel, The, 45 Minn. L. Rev. 693 (1960).
  • Yale Kamisar, The Right to Counsel and the Fourteenth Amendment: A Dialogue on "The Most Pervasive Right" of an Accused, 30 The University of Chicago Law Review 1–77 (1962).
  • Stacey L. Reed, Look Back at Gideon v. Wainwright after Forty Years: An Examination of the Illusory Sixth Amendment Right to Assistance of Counsel, 52 Drake L. Rev. 47 (2003).