Betts v Brady

Betts v Brady was a landmark supreme court case that denied counsel to indigent defendants when prosecuted by a state. It was overturned by Gideon v wainwright years later. This was a case about robbery and how the defendant was denied a trial lawyer when he requested one. He thought he was being held unlawfully so he appealed to the supreme court asking that he should be able to have a lawyer present at the trial. In a six to three decision, the Court found that Betts did not have the right to be appointed counsel with Justice Hugo Black emphatically dissenting. in the dissent justice black wrote, "A practice cannot be reconciled with ‘common and fundamental ideas of fairness and right,’ which subjects innocent men to increased dangers of conviction merely because of their poverty. Whether a man is innocent cannot be determined from a trial in which, as here, denial of counsel has made it impossible to conclude, with any satisfactory degree of certainty, that the defendant's case was adequately presented."

He argued the civil rights issue and said that poverty should not determine the outcome of a case no matter who is accused. This opinion is what got it overturned years later in the gideon v wainwright case in 1963.