Gideon v Wainwright (1963) is a landmark Supreme Court case that incorporated the Sixth Amendment through the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, requiring states to provide public defenders to criminal defendants that cannot afford counsel. [1] However, since the Supreme Court’s ruling, it has been commonly observed that defendants receive less than effective representation from counsel, as public defenders are often stretched too thin and forced to grapple with enormous case loads, back-to-back trials, and abysmal funding by the state. Attempting to rectify this, the Supreme Court defined “effective assistance of counsel” in Strickland v Washington (1984), with the majority opinion adopting a loose set of requirements public defenders should meet. [2] This, however, has spawned its own issues. As Justice Marshall’s dissenting opinion predicted, the Court’s attempt to define counsel ironically exacerbated the issue by allowing courts to determine that lawyers have met the criteria of effective counsel without actually having provided it. Therefore, revisiting Strickland reveals that the Strickland test has done more harm than good, the dissenting opinion should have been considered more seriously, and the Supreme Court has a responsibility to rectify the injustices it has caused through this decision.

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