Chasing Gideon (10 page)

He tries to be fair. “I've talked to a couple of cops since then, and some were on my side. So I know it's not all of them that are bad,” he says. “It's the system. What's wrong with the system that this can happen?”

He throws the question out, where it hangs for a few moments in dusk's silence.

“But I'm not sour about it,” Sean says finally. “At least I'm free. And I have a job.” He gets up, noticing that the room has grown dark, and turns on the living room light—shaking the mood, dislodging the memory. “I like life and everything.”

On an evening in January some ten-plus years after she was in the car wreck on the corner of Garland and Belt, Judy Rodeen still struggles to think or speak coherently about the crash. “I don't remember anything about the accident,” she tells me, her voice soft, halting. I strain to hear. “I was in [the] backseat of my parents' car and I, I . . . I don't remember anything. We were coming from Starbucks.”

“I'd rather not bring it up at all,” she says when I ask about the car wreck, the hospital, the trial. She goes on to bring it up.

“The whole thing . . . it was a terrible experience. My parents died.” She tells me that her father was hospitalized, that he lost consciousness. “So I never got to talk to him. . . . Then we had to make a decision to take him off life support.” Her mother was “too far into Alzheimer's to be of any help about what to do next.” Then ten months later, her mother died. “That's why it was so traumatic to me, because both my parents died that year,” she sighs. “It's been a bad few years.”

Judy, despite the fact that she appeared to be in the worst shape in the moments after the accident—her face bloodied and cut from going through the window—bore up, and still works as the office manager at the high school. “I had stitches in my head and around my eye and I was black and blue,” she says. “But nothing was broken. I've recuperated. No ill effects.” She gives a sharp, harsh laugh. “Other than the mental part.”

She elaborates: “The young man was at the school that I worked at.” She dreaded the prospect of running into him. She didn't know what he looked like and she decided to keep it that way. “I could have looked the student's picture up at school,” she says, eschewing the use of his name even in this conversation a decade later. “And I didn't. I was always terrified he would walk into the office and he would
know who I was but I wouldn't know him.” She pauses. “Still, I never wanted to ever see him, so it was better not to know who he was.”

The first she saw of him, she says, was at the trial, where she mostly stared at the back of his head as he sat at the table next to the public defender. And now, all these years later, the very fact of the trial puzzles her. “I was approached by them, by the city,” she says, explaining that they told her some days after her father's death that there would be a trial. “Otherwise I would have just accepted it for what it was . . . an accident.” She says she was “dumbfounded.”

“I just kind of went along with it,” she says. “I had no idea what I was supposed to do, what I should do about it.” She describes herself as “pretty naive” about the reason. “I think they wanted to charge him with vehicular homicide.” She pauses, picks her words carefully. “I never thought he drove with the intent to kill,” she says. “It was an accident. And that's just the way I approached it.”

“Sometimes people suggest that a trial can bring closure, a sense of—” I say.

She interrupts me. “No, just . . . no, there isn't. I wouldn't say there was any closure.”

“All countrys try to give there citizens a fair trial and see to it that they have counsel,” a semi-literate Clarence Earl Gideon complained to the U.S. Supreme Court in his 1962 petition, wondering why he was being denied a lawyer simply because he was poor. Photo courtesy of the State Archives of Florida.

I
n the summer of 1961, cops in Panama City, Florida, arrested a man named Clarence Earl Gideon for breaking into a pool hall and stealing change from a cigarette machine and jukebox, some bottles of beer and wine, and a couple of sodas. He was fifty-one years old and had been arrested a lot in the past for petty crimes, including theft and gambling.
¹
He had done time before—and in the process, took the trouble to educate himself about the law.

He learned one important lesson: the law is pretty complicated.

In fact, Gideon decided, the law is so complicated, he ought to have an attorney to help him navigate his criminal trial. On August 4, 1961, as his trial on the pool hall charges began, he asked the judge if he might have a lawyer. When Judge Robert L. McCrary Jr. of the Circuit Court of the Fourteenth Judicial Circuit asked him if he was ready for trial, Gideon said no.

“Why aren't you ready?” the judge asked.

“I have no counsel,” Gideon replied.

The judge asked him a few other questions and then repeated, “Now tell us what you said again, so we can understand you, please.”

“Your Honor, I said I request this court to appoint counsel to represent me in this trial.”

The judge explained that impoverished defendants were entitled to court-appointed lawyers only in capital cases.

“Let the record show that the defendant has asked the court to appoint counsel to represent him in this trial and the court denied the request,” the judge said, inadvertently laying the groundwork for Clarence Earl Gideon's later game-changing plea to the Supreme Court of the United States.
²
For now, though, the trial proceeded with Gideon representing himself. He bumbled through.

This was a small town, with informal small-town justice. Panama City, a Gulf Coast city located on the panhandle between Pensacola and Tallahassee, is the county seat of Bay County. In 1961, the town had a population of approximately 33,000. (Nothing much has changed population-wise in the ensuing fifty years; the 2010 census puts the number at 36,484.
³
)The community of Bay Harbor, where Gideon lived, was located near the International Paper Plant, just outside of the city limits. The place stunk, literally. The stench, and belching smoke from the factory, set the tone for the town. And the area where Gideon lived in a rooming house bore the brunt of this, attracting the down-and-out to its worn buildings and bars, to kick up dust as they ambled down its dirty streets.

Cutting through the settlement was a small strip of commercial establishments: a grocery store, a bar, a hotel, and the Bay Harbor Poolroom. On June 3, 1961, at 8
A.M.
, the owner of the Bay Harbor Poolroom, Ira Strickland Jr., arrived to open the bar, only to be greeted by a local cop named Duell Pitts. Pitts told Strickland that at some point between midnight the previous night—when Strickland had closed the bar—and that morning, someone had broken into his pool hall. Strickland discovered that a window had been smashed, a cigarette machine and jukebox had been broken into and coins were taken from both machines, and a small amount of beer and wine had been stolen. A police officer by the name of Henry Berryhill Jr. had discovered the break-in during his usual rounds. Berryhill questioned Henry Cook, a young man who happened to be hanging around outside the poolroom at 5:30 that morning. Cook knew Clarence Earl Gideon, and told the cop he had seen Gideon inside the building. Cook claimed that he saw Gideon leave the bar with a bottle of wine in his hand, his pockets bulging with change, as Gideon strode over to a pay phone on the corner to make a call. According to Cook, Gideon then got into a
taxi that he had evidently called. On the basis of this eyewitness, along with the account of the taxi driver, Preston Bray—who said that he had driven Gideon downtown and that Gideon had told him, “If anyone asks you where you left me off, you don't know; you haven't seen me”—Pitts questioned Gideon. He discovered that Gideon had $25.28 in quarters, nickels, dimes, and pennies in his pockets. The police arrested Gideon, and charged him with a felony, breaking and entering with intent to commit “petit larceny.”

When Gideon went to court on August 4, 1961, he knew the general nature of the charges against him but, having been incarcerated in the local jail awaiting trial, his ability to investigate his own case or even talk to the witnesses he hoped to call was severely curtailed. He'd been in court enough in the past to know that the law was complicated and that trials were difficult for laymen to navigate, thus his demand to the court that he be appointed an attorney to represent him. He insisted he had a constitutional right. The judge gently informed him otherwise. “I'm sorry, Mr. Gideon,” he said, explaining that it could not be done. “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,” Gideon insisted.
⁴

In fact, the Supreme Court said the opposite. Thanks to a 1942 decision, commonly referred to as the Betts Rule, Gideon could have qualified for free counsel only if there had been “special circumstances” in the case. If a person was mentally disabled, illiterate, or insane he might qualify for a free lawyer due to the “special circumstances” of the case. Also, if the case was particularly complicated, it could count as “special circumstances.” But Gideon did not offer up any “special circumstances.” From his point of view, the Sixth Amendment was clear: “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall . . . have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.” He was, essentially, taking the amendment at its word.

But without any “special circumstances”—or at least any that would be immediately apparent—the judge denied Gideon's request. To his credit, Judge McCrary did attempt to lead Gideon through the process. But during jury selection, he did not give Gideon the option of participating meaningfully in the selection of
a jury. Instead, he simply asked the prospective jurors a few questions on Gideon's behalf. After questioning them, the judge turned to Gideon. “Now, Mr. Gideon, look these six gentlemen over and if you don't want them to sit as a jury to try your case, just point out the one, or more, all six of them if you want to, and the Court will excuse them and we will call another, or some others, to try your case,” he said. “You don't have to have a reason, just look them over and if you don't like their looks, that's all it takes to get them excused.”

Gideon didn't argue. “They suit me alright, Your Honor,” he said, making his first—and possibly biggest—tactical mistake.
⁵

The trial moved relatively quickly. The opening remarks by Gideon and assistant state attorney William Harris were not recorded. The state called two witnesses, Henry Cook (the eyewitness) and Ira Strickland (the pool hall owner). Gideon called eight witnesses, including two police officers, the cabbie who had picked him up, and his landlady at the rooming house. No particularly new information was brought forward from Gideon's witnesses. Gideon then gave a closing argument of approximately eleven minutes; Harris spoke for nine. These speeches were not taken down by the court recorder. A jury of six men found Gideon guilty. (A jury of six instead of twelve was common here. Also, an all-male jury was the norm across the country. It wasn't until 1975 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in
Taylor v. Louisiana
that women could not be excluded that women were regularly seated on juries; in Florida—and many states—the laws vaguely allowed women to serve, if they wanted to, and if they took the trouble to go to the courthouse and file a written request asserting as much, which few did.)

Three weeks later, on August 25, the judge imposed the maximum sentence of five years, and Gideon was sent to the Florida State Prison at Raiford. But Gideon refused to simply sit tight and do time. He decided to fight back, and no one quite knows why or what compelled him so painstakingly to pursue a retrial with an attorney. In any case, two months later, Gideon sent a letter to the Florida Supreme Court, appealing for a writ of habeas corpus, saying he had been unlawfully imprisoned. Handwritten mostly in pencil, and addressed to the “Suphreme Court of the State of
Florida,” the letter said: “I am a pauper without funds are any possibility of obtaining financiable aid and I Beg of this court to Listen and act upon my plea.”
⁶

“Gideon's punctuation and spelling were full of surprises,” a charitable Anthony Lewis later wrote in his 1964 bestseller,
Gideon's Trumpet
. And indeed, this was the case.

But mixed in with the kind of grammar and spelling problems that you would find in a fourth grader's cahier, were some decent arguments that a first-year law student might make. “I was denied that rights of the 4th, 5th and 14th amendments of the Bill of rights,” he wrote, grasping for constitutional backup. “I, Clarence Earl Gideon, will show this court that I did not have a fair trial and was denied my constutional rights that is gurranteed by the constution and the Bill of rights by the United States Government. I was without funds and without a attorney. I asked this court to appoint to me a attorney but they denied me that right.”