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Disqualifying Defense Counsel: The Curse Of The Sixth Amendment, Keith Swisher

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Lawyer disqualification—the process of ejecting a conflicted lawyer, firm, or agency from a case—is fairly routine and well-mapped in civil litigation. In criminal cases, however, there is an added ingredient: the Sixth Amendment. Gideon, which is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, effectively added this ingredient to disqualification analysis involving indigent state defendants although it already existed in essence for both federal defendants and defendants with the wherewithal to retain counsel. Once a defendant is entitled to counsel, the many questions that follow include whether and to what extent conflicts of interest—or other misconduct—render that counsel constitutionally ineffective. Most cases and commentary …