Our federal and state governments are responsible for a wide range of activities in which exist questions over government’s legitimate role. These programs and activities include, but are not limited to, funding the arts, owning car companies, managing retirement funding, paying for health care, day care, and police protection for the funerals of the rich and famous. This list could go on for pages.
There is also a government responsibility that receives far too little funding and attention despite being clearly articulated in the U.S. Constitution and reinforced by a unanimous Supreme Court decision. The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states:
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to … have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
In 1963 the Supreme Court held in the case of Gideon v Wainwright:
The right of an indigent defendant in a criminal trial to have the assistance of counsel is a fundamental right essential to a fair trial, and petitioner’s trial and conviction without the assistance of counsel violated the Fourteenth Amendment.
As information, the Fourteenth Amendment reads:
…nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
This is a bit of a long winded way to establish that conservatives, those that claim to believe in the rule of law, should be adamant and unrelenting in their support for indigent legal defense.
A recent report from the bipartisan Constitution Project concluded that “defendants throughout the country, especially in the lower criminal courts, are still convicted and imprisoned each year without any legal representation at all, or are “represented” by lawyers who have hundreds of other cases, and lack the requisite expertise.”
This should inflame liberals concerned with the inhumanity of this injustice.
Unfortunately, the right of the poor to quality legal defense is simply not sexy to conservatives or liberals. Politicians can’t buy votes by inserting a provision for legal defense funding in a bill among their other pork projects, and they sure won’t win votes by championing indigent defense. Economic times are difficult. People need to petition their governments to get whatever they can for themselves. Damn the future and the law.
During an interview with NPR, one of the co-chairs of the Constitution Project’s National Right to Counsel Committee, Tim Lewis, asked, “Even in difficult economic times, how much is a Constitutional right worth?”
I think that Constitutional right is worth at least as much time and effort from our state and national leaders, and our citizens, as the health care debate. At least as much.
