by Chrystal Mahan

Created on: November 03, 2009

Anthony Lewis was a columnist for the New York Times. He was previously its

Chief London Correspondent and before that was the Times Washington Bureau, covering the Supreme Court and the Justice Department. Mr. Lewis was born in 1927 in New York City. After graduating from Harvard in 1948, he spent four years with the Sunday department of the New York Times and then became a general assignment reporter for the Washington Daily News. While working for the News he won a Pulitzer Prize for national correspondence and the Heywood Broun Award in 1955 for a series of stories on the Federal loyalty - security program. He was a Nieman Fellow in 1956-1957. In 1963 he won a second Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Supreme Court. He is the co-author, with the New York Times, of Portrait of a Decade: The Second American Revolution. (Lewis, 278).

He is married to Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, who was formerly the General Counsel and Vice-President at Harvard University. She wrote the majority opinion in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, which legalized gay marriage in Massachusetts. (Wikipedia)

Given this basic outline of the author's history it is no wonder he is writing a book regarding the Gideon vs. Wainwright case. This is the story of "how one man, a poor prisoner, took his case to the Supreme Court - and changed the law of the United States." In my opinion the author's background, time, or place does not give an obvious bias one way or another to the conclusion reached. What Lewis does is tell the story of a poor man in Florida whose case may have turned out differently had he been appointed a lawyer instead of trying to defend himself. At that time their was not a law that "if you can not afford a lawyer one will be appointed to you" like we here every day on many popular cop and law television shows. This man did the best he could with what little education he had behind him and was forced to defend himself. What Lewis does is tell the story, completely fact based with references and what appears to be of very little opinion of his own.

The facts are as follows:

Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963), is a landmark case in United States Supreme Court history. In the case, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that state courts are required under the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution to provide counsel in criminal cases for defendants unable to afford their own attorneys. (Wikipedia)

The

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