Clarence Earl Gideon

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Clarence Earl Gideon (August 30, 1910 – January 18, 1972) was a poor drifter accused in a Florida state court of felony theft, who fought to have a lawyer appointed to his case resulting in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Gideon v. Wainwright.

1 Early life
2 Conviction and Gideon v. Wainwright
3 Later life
4 See also

[edit] Early life

Gideon was born in Missouri, on August 30, 1910, and his father died when he was 3. Gideon quit school after eighth grade and ran away from home, living as a homeless drifter. By the time he was 16, Gideon had begun compiling a petty crime profile.

Gideon spent a year in a reformatory for burglary before finding work at a shoe factory. At age 18, he was arrested in Missouri and charged with robbery, burglary and larceny. Gideon was sentenced to 10 years but released after three, in 1932, just as the Great Depression was beginning.

Gideon spent most of the next three decades in poverty. He served some more prison terms at Leavenworth, Kansas, for stealing government property, in Missouri for stealing, larceny and escape, and in Texas for theft.

Between his jail terms Gideon was married four times. The first three ended quickly, but the fourth to a woman named Ruth lasted. They settled in Orange, Texas, in the mid-1950s, and Gideon found irregular work as a tugboat laborer and bartender until he was forced to spend three years in bed because of tuberculosis.

Gideon and Ruth had three children, born in 1956, 1957 and 1959 ; the first two in Orange, the third after he had moved to Panama City, Florida. The three children later were taken away by welfare authorities. Gideon started working as an electrician in Florida, but began gambling for money because of his low wages. Gideon didn't serve any more time in jail, until 1961.

[edit] Conviction and Gideon v. Wainwright

On June 3, 1961, $5 in change, a few bottles of beers and soda were stolen from a pool hall/beer joint that belonged to a man named Ira Strickland Jr. Henry Cook, a 22-year-old resident who lived nearby, told the police that he had seen Gideon walk out of the joint with a bottle of wine and his pockets filled with coins, and then get in a cab and leave.

Gideon was arrested in a tavern and was forced to defend himself at his trial after being denied a lawyer by his trial judge, Robert McCrary Jr. (being too poor to pay for one). He, with no training in law, was convicted of breaking and entering with the intent to commit larceny on August 27, three days before his 52nd birthday. Judge McCrary handed down the maximum sentence, which was five years in prison.

Gideon, then in jail, studied the American legal system and came to the conclusion that Judge McCrary had violated his constitutional right to counsel under the Sixth Amendment, applicable to the state through the due process clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. He then wrote to an FBI office in Florida and next to the state supreme court, but was denied help. Then in January 1962 he mailed a five-page petition to the Supreme Court of the United States asking the nine justices to consider his complaint. The Supreme Court, in reply, agreed to hear his appeal. The case was to be called Gideon v. Cochran.

The Gideon v. Wainwright case took place on January 15, 1963. Abe Fortas was assigned to represent Gideon. Bruce Jacob, the assistant Florida attorney general, was assigned to argue against Gideon. Fortas argued that a common man with no training in law cannot go up against a trained lawyer and win, and that "you cannot have a fair trial without counsel." Jacob argued that the issue at hand was a state issue not federal, the current practice of only appointing counsel under "special circumstances" in non-capital cases should stand, that thousands of convictions could be thrown out if it was changed and that Florida has followed for 21 years "in good faith" the 1942 Supreme Court ruling in the Betts case. The hearing ended three hours and five minutes after it began. (The case's first title, Gideon v. Cochran, was changed to Gideon v. Wainwright, after Louie L. Wainwright replaced H.G. Cochran as the director of the Florida Division of Corrections, a fact made aware to the Supreme Court clerk by Jacob). The Supreme Court ruled in Gideon's favor in March, 1963 by a 9-0 vote.

[edit] Later life

Although about 2,000 convicts in Florida alone were freed as a result of the Gideon decision (because state governments did not want to take on the time, trouble and expense of new trials) Gideon himself was not freed. He instead got another trial.

Gideon chose W. Fred Turner to be his lawyer for his second trial. The retrial took place on August 5, 1963, five months after the Supreme Court ruling. Turner, during the trial, picked apart the testimony of eyewitness Henry Cook, and in his opening and closing statements suggested the idea that Cook likely had been a lookout for a group of young men who broke in to steal beer, then grabbed the coins while they were at it. Turner also got a statement from the cab driver who took Gideon from Bay Harbor, Florida to a bar in Panama City, Florida, stating that Gideon was carrying neither wine, beer nor Coke when he picked him up, even though Cook testified that he watched Gideon walk from the pool hall to the phone, then wait for a cab, discrediting Cook completely.

The jury acquitted Gideon after one hour of deliberation. After his acquittal he resumed his previous way of life and married again some time later. He died in Fort Lauderdale on January 18, 1972, at age 61. His family in Missouri accepted Gideon's body and laid him to rest in an unmarked grave. A granite headstone was later added.

Robert F. Kennedy remarked about the case, "If an obscure Florida convict named Clarence Earl Gideon had not sat down in prison with a pencil and paper to write a letter to the Supreme Court; and if the Supreme Court had not taken the trouble to look at the merits in that one crude petition among all the bundles of mail it must receive everyday, the vast machinery of American law would have gone on functioning undisturbed. But Gideon did write that letter; the court did look into his case; and he was re-tried with the help of competent defense counsel; found not guilty and released from prison after two years of punishment for a crime he did not commit. And the whole course of legal history has been changed" (Kennedy, 1963).