When a Minister Is Murdered, There Is No Right to Counsel

That's the message the Supreme Court is sending as we approach the 50th anniversary of Gideon v. Wainwright, a famous defendants' rights case.

Few noticed or seemed to care Monday morning when the United States Supreme Court announced that it had declined to review a death penalty case out of Alabama styled Price v. Thomas. There was no angry retort from the denial of certiorari written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. And Google says there was no media coverage of Monday's news anywhere -- including, as near as I can tell, in Fayette County, Alabama, where, in 1991, Christopher Lee Price brutally murdered a husband, a minister, a man named William "Bill" Lynn.

As a matter both of journalism and public policy, this is a shame. Because as America gears up over the next ten days to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Gideon v. Wainwright, the much-revered ruling which purported to give every American the right to counsel, cases like Price v. Thomas remind us how little that right often means in cases where it counts the most. The truth is that the justices sanctified the right to counsel on March 18, 1963 but have spent much of the past 50 years desecrating it.

And the truth out of Alabama is that federal and state judges have consistently denied Price his right to counsel, and even his more basic right. There is no question that the crime here was shocking and that Price is guilty. But there is no question, too, that his court-appointed lawyer did not come close to providing him with "effective assistance" in the penalty phase of his trial. What does the fabled case mean 50 years later? It means you don't have the right to counsel you thought you did.