RACE
AND THE
RIGHT TO COUNSEL on research by
S H AU N O S S E I - OW U S U Presidential Assistant Professor of Law
A new article by University of Pennsylvania Law School professor Shaun Ossei-Owusu reveals the critical role of race in the development of a staple of the American criminal justice system: the constitutional guarantee of an attorney for defendants too poor to afford one. “The Sixth Amendment Façade: The Racial Evolution of the Right to Counsel,” forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, marshals “archival documents, primary sources, oral histories, case law, and secondary literature” to trace the history of indigent defense and the Sixth Amendment right to counsel from the early twentieth century to the present, revealing how racial politics influenced the right’s creation, development, and later curtailment.
“The deluge of wrongful convictions due to deficient lawyering are telling; they offer a glimpse of who bore the consequences of a right to counsel jurisprudence that enabled ineffectiveness.”
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