ON MARCH 18, 2003, America will commemorate the 40th anniversary of the landmark 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Gideon v. Wainwright, in which a poor Florida prison inmate caused the single biggest change in the history of the U.S. criminal justice system. The Gideon decision stated that all persons accused of a felony are guaranteed the right to counsel.

The promise of Gideon goes unfulfilled for many, however, as appointed lawyers often do not have the resources necessary to provide competent representation.

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) has developed a Web site, "Gideon at 40: Understanding the Right to Counsel," found at www.nacdl.org/gideon, which "provides information about the groundbreaking Gideon decision, the role of counsel in ensuring fair justice systems, and the important work that remains to be done in order to truly fulfill the promise of Gideon." The site also provides a lesson plan for use in high school classes to commemorate the landmark decision.

The following books, films and Web sites, offered as classroom resources on the NACDL Web site, are also great resources for attorneys who want to commemorate the 40^th anniversary of Gideon by examining the evolution of right to counsel and whether the promise of Gideon has been kept.

Books

• "Gideon's Trumpet" by Anthony Lewis
• "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee
• "Actual Innocence: When Justice Goes Wrong and How to Make it Right" by Jim Dwyer, Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck
• "Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted" by Jim Dwyer, Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck
• "May God Have Mercy: A True Story of Crime & Punishment" by John C. Tucker
• "Public Defender" by Gerald W. Getty
• "Public Defender: Lawyer for the People" by Joan Hewitt and Richard Hewitt
• "The Public Defender" by Mayer Goldman

Documentaries

• "Murder on a Sunday Morning" www.hbo.com/docs/americaundercover
• "Presumed Guilty: Tales of the Public Defender" www.pbs.org/kqed/presumedguilty
• "Innocent Until Proven Guilty: James Forman, Jr., Public Defender" www.filmakers.com/indivs/InnocentUntil.htm

Web Sites

• The Oyez Project at Northwestern University, www.oyez.org. Contains the case docket, abstract, voting sheet and oral arguments in Gideon v. Wainright.
• National Equal Justice Library, www.equaljusticelibrary.org. Contains historical information about the Gideon case, including oral history interviews with Abe Krash, Anthony Lewis and Bruce Jacobs.

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