Gideon's Trumpet Read Online Free Page A

lawsuit must show that he was personally injured or affected by it. If Tom assaults Dick, Harry has no standing to sue Tom for damages. A well-meaning citizen in Panama City, Florida, charged with no crime himself, could not bring a suit to make the state appoint counsel for Clarence Earl Gideon. A noted decision on standing arose from Connecticut’s birth-control law, making it a crime to use contraceptives. The Supreme Court threw out a Connecticut doctor’s claim that the law deprived his patients of their constitutional rights, holding that the doctor had no standing to assert the patients’ rights. Years later some Connecticut women in medical need of contraceptives themselves sued, but then a divided Supreme Court invoked another doctrine to dismiss the case. The women had sued to have the law declared unconstitutional rather than waiting to be subjected to a criminal prosecution for using contraceptives. In those circumstances, the Court said, there was no sign that Connecticut would actually enforce the archaic birth-control law and the Court should not decide so new and delicate a constitutional question.
    If there is any other way to resolve a case, the Court makes it a practice to avoid constitutional issues, no matter how strongly pressed. At the height of Federal Government’s loyalty-security program, the dismissal of those who were alleged to be security risks on the basis of secret charges by unnamed informants was attacked as unconstitutional in the Supreme Court. Both the Government and lawyers for the dismissed employee who had brought the case urged the Court to decide the basic constitutional issue; but a majority of the justices declined to do so, finding instead that the dismissal was invalid because Governmentofficials had violated their own regulations. Ten years later the constitutionality of security dismissals on undisclosed charges has still not been settled, and it may never be. The rule, in Brandeis’s language, is that the Court will not “anticipate a question of constitutional law in advance of the necessity of deciding it.”
    The Court has made it a practice not to give advisory opinions, even to Presidents. (Washington sought one and was turned down by the justices.) Nor will the Court ordinarily decide “feigned cases,” got up by friends just to obtain an interpretation of the Constitution. Ours is an adversary system of justice, and its assumption is that the truth is best brought out in a genuine lawsuit between genuinely opposing parties. Brandeis said: “The Court will not pass upon the constitutionality of legislation in a friendly, nonadversary proceeding, declining because to decide such questions is legitimate only in the last resort, and as a necessity in the determination of real, earnest and vital controversy between individuals.”
    Gideon’s case appeared to meet all these requirements. He had certainly raised his federal claim, that the Constitution entitled him to a lawyer, at the earliest possible moment—when his case was called for trial. He had not appealed his conviction, and in some states that would have been a fatal procedural error. But in Florida a prisoner may challenge the constitutionality of his conviction by petitioning the state supreme court to issue a writ of habeas corpus. Gideon had done just that, stating his constitutional claim for counsel again in the petition, and the Florida Supreme Court had presumably passed on and rejected the claim when it summarily denied his petition. Its judgment was final, and therefore ripe for review in the United States Supreme Court. Since this was a criminal case, suchproblems as standing did not arise; a man who has been sent to jail in a manner he terms illegal certainly has been injured, and his case is not feigned or advisory or premature.
    The claim that Gideon presented to the Supreme Court was, in sum, one that the Court
could
hear. Whether the Court
would
hear it was another and very different