The American Middle Class by Robert Rycroft

Author:Robert Rycroft
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO

WARREN COURT

The Warren Court—named for the period between 1953 and 1969 when the U.S. Supreme Court was led by Chief Justice Earl Warren—broadly expanded rights in numerous areas, including civil rights and civil liberties (Sunstein 2005, 3–4). Its decisions addressed racial and economic equality, criminal justice, access to justice, voting discrimination, and privacy.

The Warren Court’s most well known decision, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, addressed racial equality in education. Chief Justice Warren wrote “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” (347 U.S. at 495, 1954). This case paved the road for national desegregation in areas not confined to education. Decisions in Brown’s wake desegregated buses (Gayle v. Browder, 1956), public beaches and bathhouses (Holmes v. City of Atlanta, 1955), and municipal golf courses (Baltimore City v. Dawson, 1955). Desegregation led to expanded opportunities for African Americans, a disproportionate percentage of the American poor. In 1966 41.8 percent of African Americans were poor and constituted 31 percent of all poor Americans. By 2012, decades after the Warren Court’s racial justice decisions, poverty among African Americans had fallen to 27.2 percent (DeSilver 2014).

The Court came to view poverty as intertwined with crime; the criminal justice system sees more individuals at or near the poverty line than those of means (Powe 2000, 445). Seminal Warren Court decisions such as Miranda v. Arizona (1966), Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), Griffin v. Illinois (1956), and Douglas v. California (1963) dramatically expanded the procedural protections.

Miranda held that the police practice of interrogating individuals without notifying them of their right to counsel and their protection against self-incrimination violated the 5th Amendment (384 U.S. at 444). Gideon was a landmark case addressing a defendant’s rights to counsel. Clarence Earl Gideon was charged with a felony, and his request for the Court to appoint him counsel was denied. Gideon represented himself and was found guilty. The Supreme Court declared that the 6th Amendment’s right to counsel in criminal cases extend to felony defendants in state courts (372 U.S. at 342).

In Griffin, the Court held that states are required to supply a free trial transcript to indigent criminal defendants if it is necessary for “adequate and effective appellate review” of a conviction (351 U.S. at 20). Justice Black emphasized the injustice of allowing high stakes determinations of life, liberty, or property to turn on one’s financial means.

The Court took up a related issue in Douglas. A California rule required state appellate courts, on the request of an indigent criminal defendant for counsel on appeal, to make “an independent investigation of the record” and to “appoint counsel [only] if in their opinion it would be helpful to the defendant or the Court (372 U.S. at 355). This rule—as it stood—meant that indigent defendants were not guaranteed counsel on appeal, unless the Court decided it was going to be worthwhile. The Court however, concluded that the appeals process is a continuation of the judicial process. Although there

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.