Gideon's Echoes

Clyde Harvey is an illiterate Negro farmer who roused the ire of his white neighbors in Corinth, Miss., last summer by letting civil rights workers stay in his house. While Harvey was out, police entered his home, found two cans of beer and what Harvey called "a little whisky in a jar." He was arrested without a warrant and charged with "possession of whisky," a Mississippi misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $500 and up to 90 days in jail.

Harvey thought he was being charged only with having the beer, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced in absentia to the full whisky rap. He did not learn about the sentence until he was jailed --eight days after the statutory time limit had passed and he could no longer appeal. When N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund lawyers heard of his plight, they got nowhere at first. Local state and federal courts not only denied relief, but they also failed to furnish the record that University of Pennsylvania Law Professor Anthony Amsterdam needed in order to argue for a writ of habeas corpus before the Fifth Circuit's enlightened U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans (TIME, Dec. 4).

Then, around midnight, the night before Amsterdam was to appear in court, Chief Judge Elbert Tuttle sent over the court's own copy of the Harvey record. Amsterdam had hardly begun racing through it when he saw a golden chance to extend a landmark Supreme Court decision: 1963's Gideon v. Wainwright. In that famous case, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment gives all accused felons the right to counsel in all state criminal trials.

Could Amsterdam convince the Court of Appeals that Gideon also applies to misdemeanors? He could and did. The court not only immediately ordered Harvey's release (after 66 days in jail), but it completely supported Amsterdam's argument. Because sentences for some misdemeanors are the same as for some felonies, ruled a federal court for the first time, defendants need lawyers in both cases.

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