Clarence Earl Gideon

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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.

Contents

[edit] Early life

Gideon was born in Hannibal, Missouri, on August 30, 1910, and his father (Charles Roscoe Gideon) died when he was three. His mother was Virginia Gregory Gideon. Gideon quit school after eighth grade and ran away from home, living as a homeless drifter. By the time he was sixteen, 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 Ada Babineaux (in October, 1955) 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.

In addition to three children that Ruth already had, 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 six 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 and a few bottles of beer and soda were stolen from Bay Harbor Pool Room, a pool hall/beer joint that belonged to Ira Strickland, Jr. He was also accussed of taking $50 from the jukebox, but this was unlikely. 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, being too poor to pay for counsel, was forced to defend himself at his trial after being denied a lawyer by his trial judge, Robert McCrary Jr. On August 25, five days before his 51st birthday, Gideon, with no training in the law, was convicted of breaking and entering with intent to commit petty larceny. Susequent to his trial, but prior to sentencing, Gideon admitted taking the items, but stated that he had found the back door open, as was Strickland's habit. He therefore felt that he was only guilty of a misdemeanor. 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 of Florida 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. Originally, the case was called Gideon v. Cochran.

The Gideon v. Cochran 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 might have to 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 original 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 known 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. This testimony completely discredited Cook.

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. Gideon's family in Missouri accepted his body and laid him to rest in an unmarked grave. A granite headstone was added later.

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 every day, 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; 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).

[edit] See also