Faretta v. California
1975 United States Supreme Court case
Faretta v. California, 422 U.S. 806 (1975), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that criminal defendants have a constitutional right to refuse counsel and represent themselves in state criminal proceedings.
Quoting Adams v. United States ex rel. McCann (1942), the Court reasoned that, "The right to assistance of counsel and the correlative right to dispense with a lawyer's help are not legal formalisms... To deny an accused a choice of procedure in circumstances in which he, though a layman, is as capable as any lawyer of making an intelligent choice, is to impair the worth of great Constitutional safeguards by treating them as empty verbalisms. … [T]o deny him in the exercise of his free choice the right to dispense with some of these safeguards … is to imprison a man in his privileges, and call it the Constitution."
Facts of the case
The defendant Anthony Faretta was accused of grand theft in Los Angeles County, California. Well before the trial began, the defendant requested permission to represent himself. Questioning by the judge revealed that he had once represented himself in a criminal case and that he believed that the public defender's office was under a heavy case load. The judge warned him that he was making a mistake and emphasized that he would receive no special treatment.
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This entry incorporates text from “Faretta v. California” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.