Every day thousands of Americans cross paths with our criminal justice system. If you don't have adequate defense, you're going to jail. Every day this nightmare happens to somebody, some somebody who can't afford an attorney to fight vigorously and against everything for them. Money speaks his own language and so does the law if you don't speak it fluently you can get yourself into a lot of trouble. Eighty percent of the people who come in contact with our criminal justice system rely on the services of court-appointed lawyers but this fundamental right is under threat. It is a fundamental right we must defend and it all started 50 years ago with a man named Clarence Earl Gideon. You know it would be nice to think of Clarence Earl Gideon as a romantic figure from some old-time movie with a mustache and a hat and a dashing style. Not at all. He was a beaten-down 50 year old man who looked like he was 75, and had had the worst life. That's what he looked like that's what he was. On June 3rd, 1961, Clarence Earl Gideon was arrested in Panama City Florida. He was charged with breaking and entering into the Bay Harbor Pool Room. Reported stolen: some wine and change from the vending machines. Gideon maintained his innocence. He had no money for bail, so he was kept in the county jail for two months awaiting trial. He had no money for a lawyer either. The next case on the docket is the case the state of Florida versus Clarence Earl Gideon. What says the defendant, are you ready for trial? I'm not ready your honor. Well why aren't you ready? I request this court to appoint counsel to represent me in this trial. Mr. Gideon, I'm sorry but I cannot appoint consul to represent you in this case. Under the laws of the state of Florida the only time the court can afford counsel to represent a defendant is when that person is charged with a capital offense. I did not understand that it was going to become a major case. In every case in a state court where there was a death sentence, the state court was obliged to furnish a lawyer to a defendant who was too poor to hire one. In addition, you're entitled to have a lawyer appointed if there were special circumstances such that you could say it was unfair, unjust for this defendant to have been tried without a lawyer. And there were no special circumstances in Gideon's case. I'm sorry but I will have to deny your request to appoint counsel to defend you in this case. The United States Supreme Court says I am entitled to be represented by counsel. Let the record show that the defendant is asked the court to appoint counsel to represent him in this trial. Even though the Supreme Court had previously said that States did not have to provide lawyers to all defendants too poor to hire their own, Gideon who had never had more than an eighth-grade education and no formal legal training was convinced it was his right. I always believed that and I thought that was actually a law. I thought that was a constitutional right and I didn't know no different. Another man with money can hire a lawyer to represent him, he'd get a better chance in a trial then I would get without an attorney. To me that was just common sense. There was no argument to it. On August 4th, 1961, a jury found Gideon guilty and the judge gave him the maximum sentence: five years at Florida State Prison. Well, my mind was already made up to what I was gonna do--I know that gonna have to fight the case in to Supreme Court at that time. It's interesting thinking about Gideon and and wondering what drove him to this incorrect belief that he was entitled to a lawyer but which turned out to be the correct belief. Just close your eyes and imagine your worst possible day. That something horrible has gone and the police are at your door or coming through your door and they're putting you in handcuffs and taking you away. Imagine the fear, the anxiety, the embarrassment, the frustration about what's happening to you and then imagine there's nobody there for you. The government has lots of people, and they've got guns, and handcuffs, and cars with lights, and rooms with bars. A prosecutor's job is to achieve justice, but critical to however you define justice is a good defense presence. You can't achieve justice unless you understand the offense and you understand the offender. And you can't understand the offender unless you have a defense attorney pushing the defender's concerns to both the prosecutor and the court. The people that I defend are not generally bad people, or generally dangerous people, Now the people that I defend are all poor people, but they are all just people. And they're people with life stories who I feel like rarely get to tell their stories. In 1985, like thousands of others, a man named Eddie Joe Lloyd found himself in much the same situation as Clarence Earl Gideon. Unlike Gideon, however, he had a lawyer. But his lawyer was not committed to his case. Even without adequate counsel, Eddie Joe Lloyd would fight for the right to tell his story. His family remembers those times vividly. My name is Ruth Lloyd Harlan and I'm Eddie Joe Lloyd's younger sister. When a person uses drugs, they change. And he started really changing and we did not know whether he had a problem, mentally or not, but it was just the drugs. Eddie Joe Lloyd believed he had a superhuman talent for solving crimes and he often contacted police with tips he got from TV news. In February of 1984, 16 year-old Michelle Jackson was abducted on her way to school. She was found raped and murdered. Eight months later, Eddie Joe Lloyd wrote to the police and detailed a story he thought he heard about the crime. They arrested him and took him down to Hermann Keifer Hospital. They really filled him up with multitude of mind-altering drugs, and they coerced him into falsely confessing to a crime that he did not commit. But once they coerced him and charged him and he was placed in a County Jail, then his mind became clear, and he saw what had happened to him, and he began to fight for his life. Eddie Joe Lloyd did fight. And, like Gideon, his story didn't end when he was sent to prison. On January 8th 1962, an envelope from Clarence Earl Gideon arrived at the Supreme Court of the United States. He asked the Supreme Court to review his case, on the grounds that I was made to stand trial without the aid of counsel. In response, the Supreme Court decided to hear Gideon's case. And since he was indigent and didn't have a lawyer, it was a practice of the Supreme Court to appoint a lawyer to represent him on his appeal. They appointed me a attorney, a Mr. Abe Fortas. Fortas. Fortas. So, from having no lawyer, he had the best lawyer in the country. Abe Fortas was a really hotshot lawyer. Of course, it was unusual for a person like Gideon to how the lawyer of Fortas's stature represent him. I don't know whether he recognized or appreciated that or not. Every man, the rich, the poor, and the poor as well as the rich, was entitled to the benefit of counsel when he was defending himself against prosecution by the mighty forces of the state. He summoned me to his office and he said, look, I'd like you to help me write the brief in this case. And he told me that he wanted to know everything about the right to counsel since the invention of money. He was a very very demanding person to work for. You know being appointed to the Gideon case was probably the best plum that any lawyer has ever ever been given. I think that every lawyer in the country would have grabbed it the chance to to be appointed to represent Gideon. And if someone had said, Bruce you can you can either represent the state or make the argument for Clarence Gideon, obviously I would have taken a Gideon side of the case. I think any lawyer would. Bruce Jacob was an assistant attorney general of Florida. The boss, the Attorney General, gave him the job of arguing this case in the Supreme Court. He didn't expect to win. Nevertheless he went about it an extremely serious, dedicated way. If we should decide that that every man is automatically entitled to counsel in every single case, not only will we have to give or provide free counsel to every individual in a felony case, a capital or a non-capital felony case, we will also have to provide counsel in all misdemeanor cases. We just thought the states ought to be the place where this decision should be made. I'm not sure I was completely sold on that that was the argument, that was the position we took. Bruce Jacob requested the other 49 state attorneys general to write amicus briefs supporting Florida's position. The Attorney General of Minnesota led the charge but not as the state of Florida might have hoped. We decided to solicit those same attorneys-general on the side of a an amicus brief that would say, it should be a national legal principle that right to counsel should be provided. We got a lot of support for it. This was new. This usually didn't happen. States would just duck on issues like that. In this case, 22 states said, no this should be changed. On January 15th, 1963, the Supreme Court of the United States heard the case of Gideon versus Wainwright. Here's what we said: An accused person cannot effectively defend himself. Without counsel, the accused cannot possibly evaluate the lawfulness of his arrest, the validity of the indictment, or information. He can't determine whether he is responsible for the crime or a lesser offense. So, that is the heart of what we were trying to say to the court. It came my turn to make the argument for the state in the Gideon case. Fortas was leaving the podium walking back to his table. I got up, I walked toward the podium. My first impression was that I was down very low in the court was up very high. The court was was very active and at the time seemed very hostile to me. On march 18th, 1963, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Gideon's favor and held, against previous precedent, that the Constitution entitled Gideon to the assistance of a lawyer in his defense. I felt great. I received a telegram from Mr. Fortas congratulating me on the decision even though the Supreme Court reversed Gideon's conviction, he did not go free immediately. Instead, he was given the opportunity for a new trial, this time with a lawyer. It showed the difference between not having an attorney and being with an attorney. The legislature of Florida immediately adopted a statewide public defender law. We've had it ever since. Up until the Gideon case, thousands of indigent defendants a year were convicted and sent to jail without counsel. And this decisions said, no more of that. That glorious principle of Gideon: in America you will be provided counsel if you can't afford it. Nobody goes to jail in America without a fair trial. That was the one cardinal thing we wanted to drive home and we succeed into that. Gideon's victory transformed the criminal justice system, but the court's decision left many details unclear. Gideon signaled to me that rights and even court decisions don't necessarily turn into realities for the people who are the intended beneficiaries of some of those decisions without implementation. You know, I think there are a lot of challenges around adequate defense for for poor people. Some of them are structural public defender programs can be burdened with so many cases and so few resources that well-intentioned highly motivated people can't do effective work. Many states actually just appoint lawyers and cap the compensation that lawyers can receive. If you tell a lawyer that you're only going to pay $500 to represent somebody who's facing life imprisonment without parole, that's going to compromise their ability to do adequate investigation, adequate preparation, adequate defense. There are some states that come up with a system called contract lawyers, which is probably the worst system of all, where lawyers literally bid on who will do the most cases for the least amount of money. It's a system guaranteed to provide ineffective assistance of counsel. Accused people are entitled and ought to have a lawyer who is focused on their needs, who will listen to them, who will investigate their assertions, that will prepare, that will put together the best defense, and go to trial. And there are very few places where that kind of system is available to the poor. In 1984, Eddie Joe Lloyd went to trial for the rape and murder of Michelle Jackson. Eddie had a court-appointed attorney. The attorney met with Eddie maybe three or four times, not many times at all, because he only had maybe about a week to prepare. They don't get paid a lot, they don't have enough to really do the best that they can do. He should have had a person out investigating, you know, the crime scene, and they did none of that. He didn't have any witnesses to testify for Eddie and you could see and hear discrepancies in testimony from the prosecution's witnesses, but no one picked up on it at all. It was just a sad situation. The jury deliberated for about thirty minutes before he was found guilty of first-degree murder. Mandatory life. No chance of parole. Not to be able to help Eddie in that instance really put a toll on the family, because no one had to hear his phone calls, no one had to read those letters, no one had to experience the pain--but us. He was devastated. Eddie Joe Lloyd insisted he was innocent but his own court-appointed appeals attorney said that he was quote, "guilty and should die." Despite the weakness of the prosecution's case he went to prison because he had inadequate legal defense. And what happened to Eddie Joe Lloyd happens every day in America. Shawna Shackleford was charged with arson. Because of inadequate legal defense, Shawna had to appear in court more than 20 times. She lost her job and wound up living out of her car. Finally, with the help of private lawyers, Shawna got the investigation she needed to dismiss all the charges against her. The first time I met my public defender, I didn't feel like he could really care about my case. I felt like I was just another number to him, and you know that it was obvious to him that I did something wrong. And, you know, he wasn't interested in whether, you know, whether I was innocent or not. Maurice Locke was charged with a number of serious drug offenses and held in jail for fifteen months awaiting trial. He maintained his innocence, but his public defender insisted he take a plea. Despite his lawyer's poor advice, Locke stood his ground, went to trial, and was acquitted. He did not cooperate with me at all. He didn't file any motion that I requested, and he was aggravated every time I asked him for any type of help. Ray Hires spent 25 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. In 2009, newly discovered witnesses revealed that the description of the killer didn't match Ray Hires. He only met a few times with his court-appointed lawyer before trial. I don't think he purposely neglected, you know, me or the case, but I think they're spread so thin because there's so many people coming through the system that, the more they can push through, the quicker they go on to somebody else. So, in 1963, in Gideon versus Wainwright, the court said everyone is entitled to a lawyer. In 1984, in a case called Strickland versus Washington the Supreme Court actually set the bar incredibly low. The court said, if you think you haven't gotten the kind of representation you deserve, you have to come to the court and prove that your lawyer was incompetent. And even if you do that you have to prove that if you had a competent lawyer you would have won the case at trial. And it's a standard that has proven to be so difficult to meet, that states have gotten the message: we don't have to spend very much on lawyers, because the courts aren't going to hold us to a very high standard. There have been lawyers who have been under the influence of alcohol and drugs, and if the court doesn't find that that intoxication impacted the trial negatively, they'll say that's not ineffective by Supreme Court standards. And so the bar has been set incredibly low and and and as a result I think lawyers public defenders every day give people the kind of representation that we would not accept for the people we love. In Michigan today, in almost all circuits, but definitely not all, the decision about whether or not a defendant will have a lawyer is going to be made by a judge. and the decision of whom that lawyer is going to be it's going to be made by a judge. The downside in that is that those lawyers in large part their livelihood depends on those cases. They represent the defendant, and then they submit a bill, and the government sends them a check. And so there's--I mean, it's human nature--you want to "please the boss," for lack of a better expression. And in this case, is the boss the client? Or is the boss the court? Well, follow the money, right? If you need for us to represent you, please fill out the application form this morning. Miss Beel? Okay, alright the first page. Please, if you got a question, please have a seat and we'll get your questions in just a moment we got to keep this organized are we gonna be here all day. When you are in court every day, facing pressures to process a lot of cases through the system, a public defender who is standing up saying slow things down, I need more time to investigate, I need more time to look into what's going on here, rather than seeing that as a lawyer who is living up to their constitutional obligation, it is easy to see that person as an obstructionist. And so I think the pressures in the system often drive players in the system to value efficiency and speed over justice, which actually can be time-consuming. I t's a very dehumanizing system Do you understand Count 1? And how do you ple ad? Guilty. And how do you plead? Guilty. And how do you plead? Guilty. And how do you plead? Guilty. And how do you plead? Guilty. Alright, [inaudible] If you ask, I tend to agree with a lot of tea party people right now and a lot of conservative grassroots, and so in when I go to tea party or grassroots conservatives and talk about indigent defense aid initially the eyes glaze over a little bit but when I say we're talking about taking people's freedoms away, unnecessarily, and I give a couple instances. And they get pretty upset they realize that it could be them someday, could be their neighbor, or family member, but it's just it's wrong it's and it's one of the few things I think government needs to get right. After Eddie Joe Lloyd was all but abandoned by his state appointed attorneys, he started looking outside the system to overturn his conviction. Eddie started working on his own appeals. He wrote them all. He submitted them all. And he got involved with the Innocence Project. They took his case. Eddie spent 17 long years in prison before they found the DNA to exonerate him. Seventeen years after his conviction, DNA evidence proved that Eddie Joe Lloyd was an innocent man. But all that time locked up took a heavy toll on his health. After Eddie was released he came out with vascular problems and subsequently within two years we lost him. I really do believe that you judge the character of a society, the commitment to the rule of law in a society, the civility of a society, not by how you treat the rich and the powerful and the privileged but by how you treat the poor, the incarcerated, the condemned, the accused. It's in that context, the only context in my view, that you can really measure our commitment to the rule of law, our commitment to justice. And when you look at these cases where we're tolerating such bad lawyering, inexcusable lawyering, embarrassing lawyer, we're saying a lot about our commitment to justice. We're saying a lot about our commitment to the rule of law. And we're saying a lot about our values and our norms. It's an outrage, it's an outrage to try a person in a criminal case without giving them the assistance of a lawyer. That's just, in a decent society, you just don't do that. You don't do that. So now it's time to revisit Gideon, because we need to continue to redefine what it means to have a lawyer assigned to a case, and that it does not just mean having a person standing in court next to a client, but that it means having a lawyer that's competent and prepared and that believes in the humanity that's remaining in the system to be in the court and represent a client. I still think we're a great country, I think we just have we have some problems in it and it has to be reformed. Something has to be done to make sure innocent men and women don't go to prison. I think America itself is a ever-evolving dream that we all gotta fight towards. No one person could do it. Of course the Supreme Court is fundamental here because this is a constitutional principle. The Justice Department should be worried about this. State Attorneys General should be speaking up for this. Local leaders should be speaking up. Then, of course, we all should. People talk about working across the aisle, I think this is a great way to do that. You know, there's partisanship but there are some issues that are so important that I really hope that it shows that we can come together. The government, the prosecutor, the sheriff, they all have significant amounts of money, and I know that in the times when government funding is low that they may cut corners. I would prefer that they cut corners on potholes. Making sure that we have a indigent defense system that makes justice possible. So, help out. Speak up. Be a force for justice.