How is it constitutional to require defendants to pay for counsel? In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right ... to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence. (U.S. Constitution, Sixth Amendment.) The last Supreme Court ruling on this appears to be Gideon v. Wainwright, which applies the Sixth Amendment "right to counsel" for indigent defendants to the states. Apparently even that right is still under contention: many jurisdictions impose fees on defendants for the use of public counsel, regardless of their (in)ability to pay. I'm still confounded by the reality that an American of any means could be required to pay for counsel in defense against criminal charges. Since, AFAIK, there is no way for an exonerated defendant to recoup the costs of his criminal defense, doesn't this amount to an "unconstitutional taking" of property? I.e., does the present system really say, "You are presumed innocent, and you have the right to counsel in defense of that assertion, but you have to spend down to your last dollar to assert that right?" If true, I guess the "American" solution might be something like legal insurance, but the principle sounds terrible.
The question has a false premise: the law does not require defendants to pay for counsel. The right to counsel can be waived. However, the fact that court-appointed counsel are provided only to indigent defendants does seem at odds with the text of the Sixth Amendment. I will explain why the right is limited by reviewing the cases and historical background. Original meaning of the Sixth Amendment Part of the answer is that the Sixth Amendment was (probably) not originally intended to create a right to court-appointed counsel at all. Rather, it reversed the historical rule that people accused of felonies were denied representation even if they could afford it. See Powell v. Alabama, 287 U.S. 45 (1932), at pp 60–69: Originally, in England, a person charged with treason or felony was denied the aid of counsel, except in respect of legal questions which the accused himself might suggest ... Historically and in practice, in our own country, at least, [the right to a hearing] has always included the right to the aid of counsel when desired and provided by the party asserting the right. See also Scott v. Illinois, 440 U.S. 367 (1979), at p 370: There is considerable doubt that the Sixth Amendment itself, as originally drafted by the Framers of the Bill of Rights, contemplated any guarantee other than the right of an accused in a criminal prosecution in a federal court to employ a lawyer to assist in his defense. Basis of the modern rule As noted in the question, Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963) is the leading case on this area of law today, but the modern rule was more precisely and recently stated in Scott, at pp 373–374: We therefore hold that the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution require only that no indigent criminal defendant be sentenced to a term of imprisonment unless the State has afforded him the right to assistance of appointed counsel in his defense. Note that the rule is not derived directly from the Sixth Amendment (at least insofar as it applies to the States). The Bill of Rights did not apply to the States before the Civil War: Barron v. Mayor &amp; City Council of Baltimore, 32 U.S. 243 (1833). After the Reconstruction Amendments, through the process of incorporation, the Supreme Court began to accept that the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause could entrench substantive rights against the States. The modern rule recognises that any person who is unable to afford a lawyer and who is sentenced to imprisonment without legal representation has been deprived of their liberty without due process of law. It does not establish an absolute right to legal representation. In Scott, after noting that the modern rule went beyond what was guaranteed by the text of the Sixth Amendment (understood in its historical context), the Court held that it did not extend to an indigent defendant who was fined for a petty theft. At p 373, the Court offered the following practical justification for limiting the rule: [W]e believe that the central premise of Argersinger – that actual imprisonment is a penalty different in kind from fines or the mere threat of imprisonment – is eminently sound, and warrants adoption of actual imprisonment as the line defining the constitutional right to appointment of counsel. Argersinger has proved reasonably workable, whereas any extension would create confusion and impose unpredictable, but necessarily substantial, costs on 50 quite diverse States. An unconstitutional taking? The Fifth Amendment provides that private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation. The concept of &quot;taking for public use&quot; is another one that's hard to pin down at the margins, but there's a good summary of the cases available in the section on When Property is Taken in the Constitution Annotated: The older cases proceeded on the basis that the requirement of just compensation for property taken for public use referred only to &quot;direct appropriation, and not to consequential injuries resulting from the exercise of lawful power.&quot; Accordingly, a variety of consequential injuries were held not to constitute takings ... Nor was government held liable for the extra expense which the property owner must obligate in order to ward off the consequence of the governmental action ... But the Court also decided long ago that land can be &quot;taken&quot; in the constitutional sense by physical invasion or occupation by the government, as occurs when the government ﬂoods land permanently or recurrently. A later formulation was that &quot;[p]roperty is taken in the constitutional sense when inroads are made upon an owner's use of it to an extent that, as between private parties, a servitude has been acquired either by agreement or in course of time.&quot; I am not aware of any case in which it was argued that the need to pay for one's own legal representation amounted to a taking for public use. It is certainly a far cry from the compulsory acquisition of land. But perhaps in a case where the defendant is acquitted, or proven innocent, a takings argument could be run by analogy with the cases dealing with innocent people who suffered loss as a result of police execution of search warrants. See Everyone Benefits, Everyone Pays: Does the Fifth Amendment Mandate Compensation When Property is Damaged During the Course of Police Activities? 9 William &amp; Mary Bill of Rights Journal 277 (2000) for more about these cases.
There have been cases in the UK where paying someone's legal bills was interpreted as joining their case. So when A with no money libels someone, and B with deep pockets pays A's lawyer, then B risks being held liable for damages if A gets convicted. So B should be very careful. Just giving you money is probably the safest. But attorney-client privilege is between attorney and client. I have been laid off twice with my company asking me to take an employment lawyer and paying for it. (Interestingly each time the bill was exactly the maximum amount the company was willing to pay :-) It would have been absurd if my company could demand information that is under attorney-client privilege just because they paid the bill. Why did two companies pay the lawyers bill? Because that way they ensure that the separation is without problems. The lawyer explained the settlement contract and what it meant exactly. They also checked that the contract didn’t contain anything unacceptable which the company would have fixed. So if I had tried to sue them later I would have no chance to win (but there was no reason to sue). Another reason not to sue was that the company offered I settlement that was very significantly more than was legally required, but if you sued them you would only get what you got in court - most likely less than you would get without suing. So basically they paid to make sure I would have no reason to sue them later.
An interrogation isn't necessarily a sit-down-in-a-room thing. Miranda v. Arizona clarifies what they mean by "interrogation" for the purposes of that opinion: By custodial interrogation, we mean questioning initiated by law enforcement officers after a person has been taken into custody or otherwise deprived of his freedom of action in any significant way. If any post-arrest questioning might happen, it is prudent to inform the defendant of their rights. Miranda also reminds us that: Any statement given freely and voluntarily without any compelling influences is, of course, admissible in evidence. The fundamental import of the privilege while an individual is in custody is not whether he is allowed to talk to the police without the benefit of warnings and counsel, but whether he can be interrogated. [...] Volunteered statements of any kind are not barred by the Fifth Amendment, and their admissibility is not affected by our holding today. The police are not required to give a Miranda warning in order to make use of statements that the defendant volunteers while in custody. But, police generally can't predict when they might ask the defendant a question (or otherwise make the defendant feel compelled to answer).
The direct answer is &quot;no&quot; and the indirect answer is &quot;yes&quot;, that is, your way of putting the matter diverges significantly from how the Bill of Complain puts the matter. The claim is that the defendant states violated the Electors Clause, the Equal Protection Clause, and the Due Process Clause. Texas claims that there is an injury in fact, citing various SCOTUS rulings e.g. Wesberry v. Sanders which says that No right is more precious in a free country than that of having a voice in the election of those who make the laws under which, as good citizens, we must live. Other rights, even the most basic, are illusory if the right to vote is undermined See the argument in the brief for more legal rhetoric. There can be no question that one state can sue another; equally clearly, the plaintiff must show actual harm and not just annoyance. New Jersey v. New York is a case involving a question of equity, not the federal constitution, but there is no legal principle to the effect that one state cannot sue over a constitutional harm rather than an equitable harm. See the brief p. 65 ff. The court does not require that there be exact precedential analogs (otherwise, Roe v. Wade would have turned out differently), what's required is simply that there be reasonable logical steps: SCOTUS gets to decide what is reasonable (or it can decline to decide).
I have not found a case directly on point, but there is a case in the right neighborhood. In Flordia v. Carter 364 So. 2d 1249, Carter was charged with perjury for making a false statement under oath. He recanted his testimony in a letter to the defense attorney the next day. Subsequently he was charged with perjury: the trial judge dismissed the case based on his having recanted (which is a defense to perjury). The judge said (quoted in the appeal below and citing a relevant precedent Brannen v. Florida 114 So. 429) It matters not whether Carter knew his original testimony was false or whether he was merely mistaken. "The law encourages the correction of erroneous and even intentionally false statements on the part of a witness, and perjury will not be predicated upon such statements when the witness, before the submission of the case, fully corrects his testimony." The lower appeals court rejected the trial court's dismissal, saying Recantation is a defense to an allegation of perjury only where there is an acknowledgement of the falsity of the original sworn statement, a voluntary retraction of that statement, and a new statement which discloses the true facts. It is not a viable defense where the perjured testimony has substantially affected the proceeding or it has become manifest that such falsity has been or will be exposed. Otherwise, one could rest on his lie, allowing it to substantially affect a proceeding, and never retract unless the falsity had been exposed. This would provide no inducement or encouragement to tell the truth. That court basically felt it was based on the threat of being discovered, and felt that a particular state statute had taken away the recantation defense, so they reinstated the charge. The appeal to the Florida Supreme Court, Carter v. Florida 384 So. 2d 1255 basically declared that the appeals court was wrong about the statute (they officially held that recantation is a defense to perjury). They concluded that Carter gained nothing by recanting (that was a distinguishing feature in a precedent that the lower court favored). The dissent in this decision opined that It may be that the false deposition testimony by Dr. Carter was inadvertent and without criminal intent.... These, however, are factual issues and should be resolved by a jury rather than by the trial court on a motion to dismiss. What unifies all opinions on the matter is that a false statement made under oath must be recanted. The reason why Carter was not convicted was that he (possibly) was unaware that his testimony was false and he did recant when he became aware of the facts.
As mentioned in a comment by @Dancrumb, the exact policies of each local police department will be different, and there are thousands of them. There is a relevant requirement at the Federal level according the Department of Justice, but it is not clear to me to what extent this applies to peers and not just supervisors: An officer who purposefully allows a fellow officer to violate a victim's Constitutional rights may be prosecuted for failure to intervene to stop the Constitutional violation. To prosecute such an officer, the government must show that the defendant officer was aware of the Constitutional violation, had an opportunity to intervene, and chose not to do so. This charge is often appropriate for supervisory officers who observe uses of excessive force without stopping them, or who actively encourage uses of excessive force but do not directly participate in them.
No. The Fourteenth Amendment says: nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; The Supreme Court has determined that this clause incorporates much of the Bill of Rights. The logic is mildly tortured, but it's basically that "due process of law" means "due process of a law that is compatible with the fundamental rights of a free society." This logic is known as "substantive due process," because it reads in to "due process of law" requirements about what those laws can do (as opposed to procedural due process, which is about the actual procedures being used). It's pretty settled that the Bill of Rights, after the 14th Amendment, should apply to the states. There's another possible way to get there: the 14th Amendment says "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States," which Justice Thomas recently thought meant that the Second Amendment applies to the states in a concurring opinion. But as of now, substantive due process is the standard logic for it. Virtually all of the Bill of Rights is incorporated against the states. There are a couple things which aren't (like juries in lawsuits, and grand juries), but the Establisment Clause is incorporated (see Everson v. Board of Education, 330 US 1).
This is not possible, simply as a matter of definitions and legal terminology. Someone who is "represented by one or more attorneys" is by definition not pro se which means representing yourself without an attorney. There are very rare instances in criminal trials involving serious consequences in which a pro se defendant is allowed to have an attorney advisor who does not represent them in court in an agency capacity, but, first, people who do that almost always lose and are almost always mentally ill (although not necessarily eligible for an insanity defense), and second, because courts generally don't allow this in any other circumstance (at least in court). The concept of getting advice from an attorney without having full fledged representation is called a "limited representation" and the law regarding limited representations more generally varies greatly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and even between different courts in the same place. For example, Colorado's state courts and Colorado's federal courts have different rules for limited representations.