address so I sent his copy to the State Attorney General. If you would like to have a copy I will send you one. The court gave me a stay until what ever time it takes the Supreme Court to review my case.
The Welfare Dept. wrote and ask me to sign releasepapers on my children. I refused, now they will not write me at all
I do not intend to let anyone take my children away from me and I will fight it ever way I know how. I hope to be able to get my children into a home someplace somehow, until I am able to take care of them myself. I believe all though I am a convict and exconvict that I have the rights to have children the same as any one else, also I have the rights to A.D.C. [aid to dependent children] and vocational training under the social security laws the same as any one else.
Outside of numerous times of arrest some for investigation, others for compromised convictions, all of the foregoing statements have been true and can stand the any kind of investegation. I am not proud of this biography. I hope that it may help you in preparing this case, I am sorry I could not write better I have done the best I could.
I have no illusions about law and courts or the people who are involved in them. I have read the complete history of law ever since the Romans first started writing them down and before of the laws of religions. I believe that each era finds a improvement in law each year brings something new for the benefit of mankind. Maybe this will be one of those small steps forward, in the past thirty-five years I have seen great advancement in Courts in penal servitude. Thank you for reading all of this. Please try to believe that all I want now from life is the chance for the love of my children the only real love I have ever had.
Sincerely yours
Clarence Earl Gideon
6
“T he question is very simple. I requested the court to appoint me attorney and the court refused.” So Gideon had written to the Supreme Court in support of his claim that the Constitution entitled the poor man charged with crime to have a lawyer at his side. Most Americans would probably have agreed with him. To even the best-informed person unfamiliar with the law it seemed inconceivable, in the year 1962, that the Constitution would allow a man to be tried without a lawyer because he could not afford one.
But the question was really as far from simple as it could imaginably be. Behind it there was a long history—a history that until recently had seemed resolutely opposed to Gideon’s claim but now had started to turn and move in hisdirection. The question that Gideon presented could not be resolved without reference to issues that had been fought over by judges and statesmen and political philosophers—issues going to the nature of our constitutional system and to the role played in it by the Supreme Court.
We have come to take it for granted in this country that courts, especially the Supreme Court, have the power to review the actions of governors, legislators, even Presidents, and set them aside as unconstitutional. But this power of judicial review, as it is called, has been given to judges in few other countries—and nowhere, at any time, to the extent that our history has confided it in the Supreme Court. In the guise of legal questions there come to the Supreme Court many of the most fundamental and divisive issues of every era, issues which judges in other lands would never dream of having to decide.
The consequences are great for Court and country. For the justices power means responsibility, a responsibility the more weighty because the Supreme Court so often has the last word. Deciding cases is never easy, but a judge may sleep more soundly after sentencing a man to death—or invalidating a President’s seizure of the nation’s steel mills—if he knows there is an appeal to a higher court. Justices of the Supreme Court do not have that luxury.
“We are not final because we are infallible,” Justice Jackson wrote,
The Welfare Dept. wrote and ask me to sign releasepapers on my children. I refused, now they will not write me at all
I do not intend to let anyone take my children away from me and I will fight it ever way I know how. I hope to be able to get my children into a home someplace somehow, until I am able to take care of them myself. I believe all though I am a convict and exconvict that I have the rights to have children the same as any one else, also I have the rights to A.D.C. [aid to dependent children] and vocational training under the social security laws the same as any one else.
Outside of numerous times of arrest some for investigation, others for compromised convictions, all of the foregoing statements have been true and can stand the any kind of investegation. I am not proud of this biography. I hope that it may help you in preparing this case, I am sorry I could not write better I have done the best I could.
I have no illusions about law and courts or the people who are involved in them. I have read the complete history of law ever since the Romans first started writing them down and before of the laws of religions. I believe that each era finds a improvement in law each year brings something new for the benefit of mankind. Maybe this will be one of those small steps forward, in the past thirty-five years I have seen great advancement in Courts in penal servitude. Thank you for reading all of this. Please try to believe that all I want now from life is the chance for the love of my children the only real love I have ever had.
Sincerely yours
Clarence Earl Gideon
6
“T he question is very simple. I requested the court to appoint me attorney and the court refused.” So Gideon had written to the Supreme Court in support of his claim that the Constitution entitled the poor man charged with crime to have a lawyer at his side. Most Americans would probably have agreed with him. To even the best-informed person unfamiliar with the law it seemed inconceivable, in the year 1962, that the Constitution would allow a man to be tried without a lawyer because he could not afford one.
But the question was really as far from simple as it could imaginably be. Behind it there was a long history—a history that until recently had seemed resolutely opposed to Gideon’s claim but now had started to turn and move in hisdirection. The question that Gideon presented could not be resolved without reference to issues that had been fought over by judges and statesmen and political philosophers—issues going to the nature of our constitutional system and to the role played in it by the Supreme Court.
We have come to take it for granted in this country that courts, especially the Supreme Court, have the power to review the actions of governors, legislators, even Presidents, and set them aside as unconstitutional. But this power of judicial review, as it is called, has been given to judges in few other countries—and nowhere, at any time, to the extent that our history has confided it in the Supreme Court. In the guise of legal questions there come to the Supreme Court many of the most fundamental and divisive issues of every era, issues which judges in other lands would never dream of having to decide.
The consequences are great for Court and country. For the justices power means responsibility, a responsibility the more weighty because the Supreme Court so often has the last word. Deciding cases is never easy, but a judge may sleep more soundly after sentencing a man to death—or invalidating a President’s seizure of the nation’s steel mills—if he knows there is an appeal to a higher court. Justices of the Supreme Court do not have that luxury.
“We are not final because we are infallible,” Justice Jackson wrote,
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