It has been nearly 50 years since the Supreme Court held that the Constitution guarantees every indigent criminal defendant a right to counsel.
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On Monday, the court will hear arguments in a Louisiana case whose outcome could determine whether that right remains robust or a state can dilute it by refusing to pay for a lawyer in a timely fashion.
In Boyer v. Louisiana, the defendant, Jonathan Boyer, spent more than seven years in the Calcasieu Parish jail, waiting to be tried for armed robbery and murder. He arrived there in 2002 and was held without bond because he was indicted on charges for which he could be sentenced to death. He stayed in that jail until 2009, when he was moved to the Louisiana State Penitentiary after being convicted of second-degree murder and armed robbery and given a life sentence.
During Mr. Boyer's first five years in jail, the case against him languished because of a "funding crisis," when the state provided no money to pay his lawyer or cover defense expenses. The parish had plenty of money to pay for a lawyer. But the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that the parish could not be ordered to pay because that was the state's duty.
In 2007, the capital charges against Mr. Boyer were dropped, and a lawyer on a public contract for handling noncapital cases was appointed to represent him. By the time of the trial in 2009, seven years had passed since the original indictment, and key witnesses were no longer available. That inexcusable delay was far longer than the one-year delay the United States Supreme Court has said is "presumptively prejudicial."
Nonetheless, a midlevel state appeals court ruled that there was no violation of the Constitution's speedy-trial requirement under the Sixth Amendment.
"The only possible remedy" for this kind of violation, the Supreme Court has said in earlier cases, is to set aside the conviction against the defendant and dismiss the case. Ruling otherwise would mean gutting the court's landmark decision in Gideon v. Wainwright and rendering the right to counsel all but meaningless.
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