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Full-Text Articles in Law
Gideon'S Ghost: Providing The Sixth Amendment Right To Counsel In Times Of Budgetary Crisis, Heather P. Baxter
Gideon'S Ghost: Providing The Sixth Amendment Right To Counsel In Times Of Budgetary Crisis, Heather P. Baxter
Faculty Scholarship
This Article discusses how the budget crisis, caused by the recent economic downturn, has created a constitutional crisis with regard to the Sixth Amendment Right to Counsel. The landmark case of Gideon v. Wainwright required states, under the Sixth Amendment, to provide free counsel to indigent criminal defendants. However, as a result of the current financial crisis, many of those who represent the indigent have found their funding cut dramatically. Consequently, Gideon survives, if at all, only as a ghostly shadow prowling the halls of criminal justice throughout the country.
This Article analyzes specific budget cuts from various states and …
Conditional Rules In Criminal Procedure: Alice In Wonderland Meets The Constitution, David Rossman
Conditional Rules In Criminal Procedure: Alice In Wonderland Meets The Constitution, David Rossman
Faculty Scholarship
Without recognizing that it has done so, the Supreme Court has created a category of constitutional rules of criminal procedure that are all in a peculiar format, conditional rules. A conditional rule depends on some future event to determine whether one has failed to honor it. In a wide variety of contexts, if a police officer, prosecutor, judge or defense attorney does something that the Constitution regulates, one cannot determine if the constitutional rule has been violated or not until some point in the future.
The Court has used three methods to create these rules. One looks to prejudice, and …