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Plsc 252: Crime and Punishment Fools & Self-representation: a Defense of Faretta v. California

By submitting this essay, I attest that it is my own work, completed in accordance with University regulations. —Daniel Cheng After the 1963 case Gideon v. Wainwright, the right to counsel is a fundamental feature of contemporary US criminal trial procedure. However, after firmly establishing that all criminal defendants have the right to counsel, the Supreme Court was faced with a new question in Faretta v. California: should a defendant have the right to reject court-appointed counsel and represent him or herself at trial? In a six-to-three ruling, the Supreme Court held that criminal defendants have the right to reject state counsel and represent themselves in trial (known as going pro se). In this essay, I analyze the Faretta decision through three frameworks for thinking about the US adversarial justice system: the fair adversaries, due process, and equal protection standards. I apply each of these standards to the rejection of state counsel and identify the consequences of such a decision. I also take a key passage of the Supreme Court's majority opinion and extract a fourth standard, " respect for the individual. " While the first three standards of fair adversaries, due process, and equal protection cannot provide a clear compelling answer on whether defendants should be able to reject state counsel, the individual respect standard provides a persuasive argument and shows that we must uphold a defendant's right to reject counsel and proceed pro se. The United States legal system is an adversarial system that protects defendants and upholds procedures that allow two competing parties to present their positions before an