Gideon's Trumpet (10 page)
Authors: Anthony Lewis
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Retail, #Nonfiction, #Legal, #History
I am treated the best of kind in this Hospital any thing I want chicken ever day. Can you imagine how I felt ever time I ate my meals of steak and chicken when I would think of my children hoping they had anything at all.
After more examinations I was put to surgery by a master Doctor but I still hardly made it after about two months I begin to get better my wife had quit writing to me and I heard thru different sources that she had quit the church and started back to drinking. I left the hospital and went home and the stories I had heard where true my wife was working in a jute joint and the children where taking care of thier self my wife was living with another man and after the fight and everthing. They had me arrested. But failed to press charges against me so the County hung a drunk charge on me rather than stay in jail I had a friend pay my fine and I went back to Hospital which I left before very long against medical advise. I went to Baton Rouge La, where I had friends and went to work. I sent my wife twenty dollars a week for the children (at this time I was a very unhappy man and I had been hook on drugs during my surgery and recovery which I know now affected me than.) After about a month and a halve I recieved one of my money orders back. I was cooking on a spud barge and we where down in the swamps at Golden Meadows La. then. I called the officer of the Juvnile Court in Panama City and ask him about my children. He told me that the Court had the children but he did not know about my wife. So I made arraignments to go to Panama City the next day.
I went to the Public Welfare and learnt that my wife had given up the children to them and had gotton herself arrested for drunken driving at Blountstown Fla and had been in jail for about thirty days but was out then. also she had recieved three of my money orders and spend them I recovered three which I give to the Welfare Dept. I went and vist the children and contacted my wife so I left her alone
I made a deal with the welfare Dept to pay them one
hundred and eighty dollars a month or forty-five a week I went back to La. and went to work I worked another month and halve and was let go on account of the health Dept. because I left the hospital against medical advice they had turn me in to the La. Health Dept. I came back to Panama City and attempted to make a living by gambling. About then I found out my wife was pregnant. sometime in January I was with a Friend of my Sgt. H. Stickell on Tyndall Air Force Base I had been living at his home for about a month we where building a club for squad service there, when out of the blue sky I was arrested one day he was with me by the F.B.I. office, shrieffs office and the City Detectives of Panama City also they serched St. Stickells home. I was not locked up. There had been a Burglary of the Armory in Panama city. So for no reason except that twenty-five years before I had rob one
I was still sick and could not make any money. My wife had her baby thru one of those professional dealers in little children. also thru the Public Welfare of Panama City, it seems to me that they approve of a woman doing that away, any way they all wanted me to sign the adoption papers for the baby which I did, I was not very happy about the whole thing.
By this time I realized that I would never be able to live with my wife and make a home for my children and I started to make arraignment to have my sister and mother take my children and to get a divorce from my wife.
a short time later I was arrested one night in my bed at the Hotel I lived in, for no reason atall, for investigation and vagrancy. Investigation of a two thousand dollar robbery of the Bay Harbor Bar which was across the street from where I lived. After two weeks in jail they put a
charge of vagrancy against me a set bond at two hundred dollars in four more days I was arraigned in County Court and plead not guilty and was turn lose. The Public Welfare seem surprised.
About a month later on June 3rd 1961 I was arrested for the crime I am now doing time on. I was charged with Breaking & Entering to comitt a misdemeanor and was convicted in a trial August 4th 1961 sentenced to State Prison August 27th 1961.
This charge growed out of gambling and was very near simalar to the charge I was tried on before in Panama City I worked in this place and did run a Poker game there. About a month before the Shrieff had been suspended by the Governor Mr. (Doc) Daffin. In the last election he was elected back to the office and will be back in for a four year term begining the first of the year.
I did not break into this building nor did I have to I had the keys to the building and if the building was broke into it was done by one of the parties involed. A short time before Ira Strictland and I had a falling out over a Poker Game he was suppose to fix with the Sheriff in Washington County there is a dog racing tract at Eboe a short ways from Panama City and his sister has a sort of motel there. He failed to do it and with the investagation going on in Panama City. I closed the game there which was not making any money. The State witness Cook who was supposed to identify me. Had a bad police record and the Court would not let me bring that out. Nor that one time I had at the point of a pistal made him stop beating a girl
I always believed that the primarily reason of trial in a court of law was to reach the truth. My trial was far from the truth. One day when I was being arraigned I seen two
trials of two different men tried without attorneys. One hour from the time they started they had two juries out and fifteen minutes later they were found guilty and sentenced. Is this a fair trial? This is common praticed thru most of this state. This penitentiary is full of men who are here with five years for Petty Larcney, drunk and minor sex crimes. Of course this is the Bible Belt and the customs here are a lot higher degree of morals. I am a electrician here and one of my fellow workers has two years for drunk and resisting arrest. Most city Police courts would give a citizen a twenty-five dollar fine for the same charge he was tried without a attorney and convicted. This week he is filing a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court for a writ of Certiorari to review a writ of Habeas Corpus. This state still runs there courts on the principal of the common law. And there are actual cases here now of citizens who have sentence with no statues covering the charges. The Supreme Court at Florida handed down a ruling last month involing the rights of man to have charges put against him within a resonable time. This man was held for about three weeks befor being charge. They upheld the lower courts one Justice disenting. They said that it was right that that was the law, but this is different. What it amounted to anyway. The one Justices said “That these laws where not made in Jest.” The desenting vote.
There was not a crime comitted in my case and I don’t feel like I had a fair trial. If I had a attorney he could brought out all of these things in my trial.
When I was arrested I was put in solitary confinment and I was not allowed the papers not to use the telephone or to write to everone I should. I did get a speedy arraignment and preliminary trial at my arraignment in Circuit Court I was allow more time to try and obtain a attorney
which I could not do. You know about the rest of my trial.
I have had no trouble since I have been here. I have work as a electrician ever since I have been here and for the last year I recieved sixty days extra gain time. This prison is all right as for prison. Proable the best in the South Outside of proper medical care I have a lung contion but have never been able to see a doctor, But that is the way prisons are the Doctors are never the best any way. I think I should be receiving medication for my lungs I was when I came in here.
My sister and mother refused to take my children and I have never written to them since I have been here I did write to the Welfare Dept. in Panama City about my children. They thru the Juvnile Court in Panama City did try to do me in for the Custody of the children last may. I recieved a summons by regestered mail to appear in court at the court house Panama City at two-thirty June 4th 1962 or be held in contempt of court. (This is the way these courts operate). I had a complaint from a Ralph V. Barnett out of Pensacola Florida. who I later found out is a professional dealer in children and was the same one who bought my wifes baby I told you about before. He wanted the custody of my three children and my step daughter so he could put them up for adoption. They did not send me a copy of the complaint. I sent in a petition for a injunction against this charging ever thing I could think of. Bill of attainer, due process of law, and slavery. I did not know his address so I sent his copy to the State Attorney General. If you would like to have a copy I will send you one. The court gave me a stay until what ever time it takes the Supreme Court to review my case.
The Welfare Dept. wrote and ask me to sign release
papers on my children. I refused, now they will not write me at all
I do not intend to let anyone take my children away from me and I will fight it ever way I know how. I hope to be able to get my children into a home someplace somehow, until I am able to take care of them myself. I believe all though I am a convict and exconvict that I have the rights to have children the same as any one else, also I have the rights to A.D.C. [aid to dependent children] and vocational training under the social security laws the same as any one else.
Outside of numerous times of arrest some for investigation, others for compromised convictions, all of the foregoing statements have been true and can stand the any kind of investegation. I am not proud of this biography. I hope that it may help you in preparing this case, I am sorry I could not write better I have done the best I could.
I have no illusions about law and courts or the people who are involved in them. I have read the complete history of law ever since the Romans first started writing them down and before of the laws of religions. I believe that each era finds a improvement in law each year brings something new for the benefit of mankind. Maybe this will be one of those small steps forward, in the past thirty-five years I have seen great advancement in Courts in penal servitude. Thank you for reading all of this. Please try to believe that all I want now from life is the chance for the love of my children the only real love I have ever had.
Sincerely yours
Clarence Earl Gideon
“T
he question is very simple. I requested the court to appoint me attorney and the court refused.” So Gideon had written to the Supreme Court in support of his claim that the Constitution entitled the poor man charged with crime to have a lawyer at his side. Most Americans would probably have agreed with him. To even the best-informed person unfamiliar with the law it seemed inconceivable, in the year 1962, that the Constitution would allow a man to be tried without a lawyer because he could not afford one.
But the question was really as far from simple as it could imaginably be. Behind it there was a long history—a history that until recently had seemed resolutely opposed to Gideon’s claim but now had started to turn and move in his
direction. The question that Gideon presented could not be resolved without reference to issues that had been fought over by judges and statesmen and political philosophers—issues going to the nature of our constitutional system and to the role played in it by the Supreme Court.
We have come to take it for granted in this country that courts, especially the Supreme Court, have the power to review the actions of governors, legislators, even Presidents, and set them aside as unconstitutional. But this power of judicial review, as it is called, has been given to judges in few other countries—and nowhere, at any time, to the extent that our history has confided it in the Supreme Court. In the guise of legal questions there come to the Supreme Court many of the most fundamental and divisive issues of every era, issues which judges in other lands would never dream of having to decide.
The consequences are great for Court and country. For the justices power means responsibility, a responsibility the more weighty because the Supreme Court so often has the last word. Deciding cases is never easy, but a judge may sleep more soundly after sentencing a man to death—or invalidating a President’s seizure of the nation’s steel mills—if he knows there is an appeal to a higher court. Justices of the Supreme Court do not have that luxury.
“We are not final because we are infallible,” Justice Jackson wrote, “but we are infallible only because we are final.” Men who know their own fallibility may find it hard to bear the burden of final decision. A few months before the Supreme Court agreed to hear Gideon’s case, Justice Charles Evans Whittaker retired after only five years on the Court, explaining candidly that he found the strain of its work too great. He told friends that when he wrote an opinion, he felt as if he were carving his words into granite.
Other men may not be bothered by judicial power, may
indeed revel in it. But the existence of power so great inevitably raises questions. Is it consistent with democracy to let nine men, appointed for life and directly answerable to no constituency, make ultimate decisions about the direction of our society? How free should a judge feel to set above the will of the people’s elected representatives the principles that he finds in the Constitution? How does he find them, given the Constitution’s vague words and the conflicting interpretations of them by judges of the past?