Clarence Earl Gideon (August 30, 1910 – January 18, 1972) was an impoverished American drifter accused in a Florida state court of felony breaking and entering.
While in prison, he appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, resulting in the landmark 1963 decision Gideon v. Wainwright holding that a criminal defendant who cannot afford to hire a lawyer must be provided one at no cost.
At his second trial, which took place in August 1963, with a court-appointed lawyer representing him and bringing out for the jury the weaknesses in the prosecution's case, Gideon was acquitted.
Gideon, after years of defiant behavior and chronic truancy, quit school after eighth grade, aged 14, and ran away from home, becoming a homeless drifter.
Gideon found irregular work as a tugboat laborer and bartender until he was bedridden by tuberculosis for three years.
[2] Henry Cook, a 22-year-old resident who lived nearby, told the police that he had seen Gideon walk out of the bar with a bottle of wine and his pockets filled with coins, and then get into a cab.
Too poor to afford counsel, Gideon was forced to defend himself at his trial after being denied a lawyer by the trial judge, Robert McCrary Jr. At the time, Florida law only gave indigent defendants no-cost legal counsel in death penalty cases.
In January 1962, he mailed a five-page petition for writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court of the United States, asking the nine justices to consider his case.
Jacob argued that the issue at hand was a state issue, not federal; the practice of only appointing counsel under "special circumstances" in non-capital cases sufficed; that thousands of convictions would have to be thrown out if it were changed; and that Florida had followed for 21 years "in good faith" the 1942 Supreme Court ruling in Betts v. Brady.
"[11] And in his closing statement, Turner suggested that Cook had likely been the lookout for a group of young men who had stolen the beer and coins from the Bay Harbor Pool Room.
[16] Anthony Lewis wrote, "Gideon's insistence on having a local lawyer — Fred Turner — may well have won the case for him.
[18] And while Gideon and his wife were separated, he had an arrangement with a Florida welfare agency for him to provide $45 a week, which was then transferred to his family.
"[20] Gideon's half-brother, who was a sergeant in the U.S. Air Force, moving back home from Japan, adopted the children.
[13] In 1963, then United States Attorney General 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.
The film was the first telecast as part of the Hallmark Hall of Fame anthology series, and co-starred José Ferrer as Abe Fortas, the attorney who pleaded Gideon's right to have a lawyer in the US Supreme Court.