Court Opinion

ID: 9426192
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:17:04.318923+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:59.550074
License: Public Domain

Mr. Chief Justice Burger,
with whom Mr. Justice Blackmun and Mr. Justice Rehnquist join, dissenting.
This case, like Herring v. New York, post, p. 853, announced today, is another example of the judicial tendency to constitutionalize what is thought “good.” That effort fails on its own terms here, because there is nothing desirable or useful in permitting every accused person, even the most uneducated and inexperienced, to insist upon conducting his own defense to criminal charges.1 Moreover, there is no constitutional basis for *837the Court’s holding, and it can only add to the problems of an already malfunctioning criminal justice system. I therefore dissent.
I
The most striking feature of the Court’s opinion is that it devotes so little discussion to the matter which it concedes is the core of the decision, that is, discerning an independent basis in the Constitution for the supposed right to represent oneself in a criminal trial.2 See ante, at 818-821, and n. 15. Its ultimate assertion that such a right is tucked between the lines of the Sixth Amendment is contradicted by the Amendment’s language and its consistent judicial interpretation.
As the Court seems to recognize, ante, at 820, the conclusion that the rights guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment are “personal” to an accused reflects nothing more than the obvious fact that it is he who is on trial and therefore has need of a defense.3 But neither that nearly *838trivial proposition nor the language of the Amendment, which speaks in uniformly mandatory terms, leads to the further conclusion that the right to counsel is merely supplemental and may be dispensed with at the whim of the accused. Rather, this Court’s decisions have consistently included the right to counsel as an integral part of the bundle making up the larger “right to a defense as we know it.” For example, in In re Oliver, 333 U. S. 257 (1948), the Court reversed a summary contempt conviction at the hands of a “one-man grand jury,” and had this to say:
“We . . . hold that failure to afford the petitioner a reasonable opportunity to defend himself against the charge of false and evasive swearing was a denial of due process of law. A person’s right to reasonable notice of a charge against him, and an opportunity to be heard in his defense — a right to his day in court — are basic in our system of jurisprudence; and these rights include, as a minimum, a right to examine the witnesses against him, to offer testimony, and to be represented by counsel.” Id., at 273.
See also Argersinger v. Hamlin, 407 U. S. 25, 27-33 (1972); Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U. S. 335, 344 (1963).
The reason for this hardly requires explanation. The fact of the matter is that in all but an extraordinarily small number of cases an accused will lose whatever defense he may have if he undertakes to conduct the trial himself. The Court’s opinion in Powell v. Alabama, 287 U. S. 45 (1932), puts the point eloquently:
“Even the intelligent and educated layman has small and sometimes no skill in the science of law. If charged with crime, he is incapable, generally, of determining for himself whether the indictment is good or bad. He is unfamiliar with the rules of evidence. Left without the aid of counsel he may *839be put on trial without a proper charge, and convicted upon incompetent evidence, or evidence irrelevant to the issue or otherwise inadmissible. He lacks both the skill and knowledge adequately to prepare his defense, even though he have a perfect one. He requires the guiding hand of counsel at every step in the proceedings against him. Without it, though he be not guilty, he faces the danger of conviction because he does not know how to establish his innocence. If that be true of men of intelligence, how much more true is it of the ignorant and illiterate, or those of feeble intellect.” Id., at 69.
Obviously, these considerations do not vary depending upon whether the accused actively desires to be represented by counsel or wishes to proceed pro se. Nor is it accurate to suggest, as the Court seems to later in its opinion, that the quality of his representation at trial is a matter with which only the accused is legitimately concerned. See ante, at 834. Although we have adopted an adversary system of criminal justice, see Gideon v. Wainwright, supra, the prosecution is more than an ordinary litigant, and the trial judge is not simply an automaton who insures that technical rules are adhered to. Both are charged with the duty of insuring that justice, in the broadest sense of that term, is achieved in every criminal trial. See Brady v. Maryland, 373 U. S. 83, 87, and n. 2 (1963); Berger v. United States, 295 U. S. 78, 88 (1935). That goal is ill-served, and the integrity of and public confidence in the system are undermined, when an easy conviction is obtained due to the defendant’s ill-advised decision to waive counsel. The damage thus inflicted is not mitigated by the lame explanation that the defendant simply availed himself of the “freedom” “to go to jail under his own banner . . . .” United States ex rel. *840Maldonado v. Denno, 348 F. 2d 12, 15 (CA2 1965). The system of criminal justice should not be available as an instrument of self-destruction.
In short, both the “spirit and the logic” of the Sixth Amendment are that every person accused of crime shall receive the fullest possible defense; in the vast majority of cases this command can be honored only by means of the expressly guaranteed right to counsel, and the trial judge is in the best position to determine whether the accused is capable of conducting his defense. True freedom of choice and society’s interest in seeing that justice is achieved can be vindicated only if the trial court retains discretion to reject any attempted waiver of counsel and insist that the accused be tried ¿ccording to the Constitution. This discretion is as critical an element of basic fairness as a trial judge’s discretion to decline to accept a plea of guilty. See Santobello v. New York, 404 U. S. 257, 262 (1971).
II
The Court’s attempt to support its result by collecting dicta from prior decisions is no more persuasive than its analysis of the Sixth Amendment. Considered in context, the cases upon which the Court relies to “beat its path” either lead it nowhere or point in precisely the opposite direction.
In Adams v. United States ex rel. McCann, 317 U. S. 269 (1942), and Carter v. Illinois, 329 U. S. 173 (1946), the defendants had competently waived counsel but later sought to renounce actions taken by them while proceeding pro se. In both cases this Court upheld the convictions, holding that neither an uncounseled waiver of jury trial nor an uncounseled guilty plea is inherently defective under the Constitution. The language which the Court so carefully excises from those opinions relates, not to an affirmative right of self-representation, but to *841the consequences of waiver.4 In Adams, for example, Mr. Justice Frankfurter was careful to point out that his reference to a defendant’s “correlative right to dispense with a lawyer’s help” meant only that “[h]e may waive his Constitutional right to assistance of counsel.. . ,” 317 U. S., at 279. See United States v. Warner, 428 F. 2d 730, 733 (CA8 1970). But, as the Court recognizes, the power to waive a constitutional right does not carry with it the right to insist upon its opposite. Singer v. United States, 380 U. S. 24, 34-35 (1965).
Similarly, in Carter the Court’s opinion observed that the Constitution “does not require that under all circumstances counsel be forced upon a defendant,” citing Adams. 329 U. S., at 174 — 175 (emphasis added). I, for one, find this statement impossible to square with the Court’s present holding that an accused is absolutely entitled to dispense with a lawyer’s help under all conditions. Thus, although Adams and Carter support the Court’s conclusion that a defendant who represents himself may not thereafter disaffirm his deliberate trial decisions, see ante, at 834-835, n. 46, they provide it no comfort regarding the primary issue in this case.5
*842Far more nearly in point is Price v. Johnston, 334 U. S. 266 (1948), where this Court held that, although the courts of appeals possess the power to command that a prisoner be produced to argue his own appeal, the exercise of that power is a matter of sound judicial discretion. An examination of the whole of the Court's reasoning on this point is instructive:
“The discretionary nature of the power in question grows out of the fact that a prisoner has no absolute right to argue his own appeal or even to be present at the proceedings in an appellate court. The absence of that right is in sharp contrast to his constitutional prerogative of being present in person at each significant stage of a felony prosecution, and to his recognized privilege of conducting his own defense at the trial. Lawful incarceration brings about the necessary withdrawal or limitation of many privileges and rights, a retraction justified by the considerations underlying our penal system. Among those so limited is the otherwise unqualified right given by § 272 of the Judicial Code, 28 U. S. C. § 394 [now § 1654], to parties in all the courts of the United States to ‘plead and manage their own causes personally.' ” Id., at 285-286 (citations omitted).
It barely requires emphasis that this passage contrasts the “constitutional prerogative” to be present at trial with the “recognized privilege” of self-representation, and strongly implies that the latter arises only from the federal statute. It is difficult to imagine a position less consistent with Price v. Johnston than that taken by the Court today.
*843The Court of Appeals cases relied upon by the Court are likewise dubious authority for its views. Only one of those cases, United States v. Plattner, 330 F. 2d 271 (CA2 1964), even attempted a reasoned analysis of the issue, and the decision in that case was largely based upon the misreading of Adams and Price which the Court perpetuates in its opinion today. See 330 F. 2d, at 275. In every other case cited ante, at 817, the Courts of Appeals assumed that the right of self-representation was constitutionally based but found that the right had not been violated and affirmed the conviction under review. It is highly questionable whether such holdings would even establish the law of the Circuits from which they came.
In short, what the Court represents as a well-traveled road is in reality a constitutional trail which it is blazing for the first time today, one that has not even been hinted at in our previous decisions. Far from an interpretation of the Sixth Amendment, it is a perversion of the provision to which we gave full .meaning in Gideon v. Wainwright and Argersinger v. Hamlin.
Ill
Like Me. Justice Blackmun, I hesitate to participate in the Court’s attempt to use history to take it where legal analysis cannot. Piecing together shreds of English legal history and early state constitutional and statutory provisions, without a full elaboration of the context in which they occurred or any evidence that they were relied upon by the drafters of our Federal Constitution, creates more questions than it answers and hardly provides the firm foundation upon which the creation of new constitutional rights should rest. We are well reminded that this Court once employed an exhaustive analysis of English and colonial practices regarding the *844right to counsel to justify the conclusion that it was fundamental to a fair trial and, less than 10 years later, used essentially the same material to conclude that it was not. Compare Powell v. Alabama, 287 U. S., at 60-65, with Betts v. Brady, 316 U. S. 455, 465-471 (1942).
As if to illustrate this point, the single historical fact cited by the Court which would appear truly relevant to ascertaining the meaning of the Sixth Amendment proves too much. As the Court points out, ante, at 831, § 35 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 provided a statutory right to self-representation in federal criminal trials. The text of the Sixth Amendment, which expressly provides only for a right to counsel, was proposed the day after the Judiciary Act was signed. It can hardly be suggested that the Members of the Congress of 1789, then few in number, were unfamiliar with the Amendment’s carefully structured language, which had been under discussion since the 1787 Constitutional Convention. And it would be most remarkable to suggest, had the right to conduct one’s own defense been considered so critical as to require constitutional protection, that it would have been left to implication. Rather, under traditional canons of construction, inclusion of the right in the Judiciary Act and its omission from the constitutional amendment drafted at the same time by many of the same men, supports the conclusion that the omission was intentional.
There is no way to reconcile the idea that the Sixth Amendment impliedly guaranteed the right of an accused to conduct his own defense with the contemporaneous action of the Congress in passing a statute explicitly giving that right. If the Sixth Amendment created a right to self-representation it was unnecessary for Congress to enact any statute on the subject at all. *845In this case, therefore, history ought to lead judges to conclude that the Constitution leaves to the judgment of legislatures, and the flexible process of statutory amendment, the question whether criminal defendants should be permitted to conduct their trials pro se. See Betts v. Brady, supra. And the fact that we have not hinted at a contrary view for 185 years is surely entitled to some weight in the scales.6 Cf. Jackman v. Rosenbaum Co., 260 U. S. 22, 31 (1922).
IV
Society has the right to expect that, when courts find new rights implied in the Constitution, their potential effect upon the resources of our criminal justice system will be considered. However, such considerations are conspicuously absent from the Court’s opinion in this case.
It hardly needs repeating that courts at all levels are already handicapped by the unsupplied demand for competent advocates, with the result that it often takes far longer to complete a given case than experienced counsel would require. If we were to assume that there will be widespread exercise of the newly discovered constitutional right to self-representation, it would almost certainly follow that there will be added congestion in the courts and that the quality of justice will suffer. Moreover, the Court blandly assumes that once an accused has elected to defend himself he will be bound by his choice and not be heard to complain of it later. Ante, at 834-835, n. 46. This assumption ignores the role of appellate review, for the reported cases are replete with instances of a convicted defendant being relieved of a *846deliberate decision even when made with the advice of counsel. See Silber v. United States, 370 U. S. 717 (1962). It is totally unrealistic, therefore, to suggest that an accused will always be held to the consequences of a decision to conduct his own defense. Unless, as may be the case, most persons accused of crime have more wit than to insist upon the dubious benefit that the Court confers today, we can expect that many expensive and good-faith prosecutions will be nullified on appeal for reasons that trial courts are now deprived of the power to prevent.7

 Absent a statute giving a right to self-representation, I believe that trial courts should have discretion under the Constitution to insist upon representation by counsel if the interests of justice so require. However, I would note that the record does not support the Court’s characterization of this case as one in which that occurred. Although he requested, and initially was granted, permission to proceed *837pro se, petitioner has expressed no dissatisfaction with the lawyer who represented him and has not alleged that his defense was impaired or that his lawyer refused to honor his suggestions regarding how the trial should be conducted. In other words, to use the Court’s phrase, petitioner has never contended that “his defense” was not fully presented. Instances of overbearing or ineffective counsel can be dealt with without contriving broad constitutional rules of dubious validity.

 The Court deliberately, and in my view properly, declines to characterize this case as one in which the defendant was denied a fair trial. See Herring v. New York, post, at 871 (Rehnquist, J., dissenting).

 The Court’s attempt to derive support for its position from the fact that the Sixth Amendment speaks in terms of the “Assistance of Counsel” requires little comment. It is most curious to suggest that an accused who exercises his right to “assistance” has thereby impliedly consented to subject himself to a “master.” Ante, at 820. And counsel’s responsibility to his client and role in the litigation do not vary depending upon whether the accused would have preferred to represent himself.

 Indeed, the portion of the Court’s quotation which warns against turning constitutional protections into “fetters” refers to the right to trial by jury, not the right to counsel. See Adams v. United States ex rel. McCann, 317 U. S. 269, 279 (1942). This Court has, of course, squarely held that there is no constitutional right to dispense with a jury. Singer v. United States, 380 U. S. 24 (1965).

 No more relevant is Snyder v. Massachusetts, 291 U. S. 97 (1934). The reference in that case to an accused’s “power ... to supersede his lawyers” simply helped explain why his defense might “be made easier” if he were “permitted to be present at the examina,tion of jurors or the summing up of counsel . . . .” Id., at 106. Mr. Justice Cardozo’s opinion for the Court made plain that this right was rooted in considerations of fundamental fairness, and was to be distinguished from those conferred by the Confronta*842tion Clause. See id., at 107. The Court's present reliance on the Snyder dicta is therefore misplaced. See n. 2, supra.

 The fact that Congress has retained a statutory right to self-representation suggests that it has also assumed that the Sixth Amendment does not guarantee such a right. See 28 U. S. C. § 1654.

 Some of the damage we can anticipate from a defendant’s ill-advised insistence on conducting his own defense may be mitigated by appointing a qualified lawyer to sit in the case as the traditional “friend of the court.” The Court does not foreclose this option. See ante, at 834^835, n. 46.