The criminal justice system has made strides forward. "The Sixth Amendment right to counsel was generally understood as guaranteeing criminal defendants the right to hire their own counsel if they could afford to do so. The Supreme Court has since ruled, however, that in both federal cases (Johnson vs. Zerbst 1938) and state cases (Gideon vs. Wainwright, 1963), the government must provide counsel to represent criminal defendants who cannot afford to hire counsel on their own, and that the right to counsel is guaranteed regardless of how short the defendant's term of imprisonment may be if convicted (Argersinger vs. Hamlin, 1972)". Warren Burger, The Washington Times, December 22, 1991.

The Supreme Court acknowledges that the constitutionally required counsel must provide effective assistance, court decisions have provided only halfhearted enforcement of the requirement of effectiveness. The counsel is pr

The rights of the accused must be enthusiastically protected. The primary goal of the criminal justice system must be to protect the rights of the accused. The state is a powerful entity that must be restrained in its attempt to prosecute the accused. The following is a good closing for this report and Michael B. Mushlin of the Pace Law Review wrote it, spring 1990. "In Gideon v. Wainwright the highest courts in the land "reach (ed) down to hear the plea of a fifty-two-year-old drifter, an outcast from society. The story of how lawyers and judges handled Clarence Gideon's handwritten misspelled appeal is worth remembering. As Anthony Lewis states, the care, the vision, the imagination of the attorneys appointed by the Supreme Court to represent Gideon on his appeal makes one proud of law and lawyers in this country. The simple elegance of the majority opinion written by Justice Hugo Black, is also impressive. In that opinion Justice Black proclaimed the "obvious truth (that) any person hauled into court, who is too poor to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured of a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him."

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Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)