Right to Counsel - Essay Example

people the right to counsel and more recently the amendment has been extended to include provision of lawyers even for those who are unable to afford a lawyer (The U.S Constitution, n.d; Barbeau, n.d). In the American criminal justice system, also referred to as the adversary system, the government is represented by the prosecution while an accused is represented by his defense lawyer. This is to ensure that the views of both the sides are presented to enable a better and fair judgment of the case.

Thus if the accused does not have the right to have a counsel, the case would become biased and one-sided. Thus the provision of the right to counsel for a criminal constitutes the sixth amendment, also referred to as the assistance of counsel clause. This has undergone a lot of changes over the past years on a case- to-case basis (Barbeau, n.d; Right to Counsel Clause, n.d). At the onset, the law in England did not provide the right to counsel for criminals which was also adopted by the early American colonies.

But America deviated from this practice and accommodated the Bill of Rights which could not be interfered by the government. An initial 20 amendments were proposed by James Madison, which were later narrowed down to ten (Right to Counsel Clause, n.d). As one of the ten amendments the right to counsel was proposed as a constitutional amendment in 1789. This was adopted in almost all states throughout America and each state varied in its enforcement of the provision. By the 1930’s the US began an in-depth analysis of the right to counsel.

While the right to counsel was made available only to federal criminal cases initially, criminal cases in the state did not have the provision. Later, in case of a death penalty the accused, in the states, was permitted to have a counsel for his defense. This right to counsel was then extended under various special circumstances such as illiteracy and competency. It was only in 1963 that the right to counsel was made available