Refuting interpretations of the Right-to-Counsel Clause indicating that it was understood as providing a balancing mechanism for the defendant against the powerful government and thereby safeguarding the sanctity of the adversarial system. Arguing, based on early colonial charters and other Founding-era documents, the colonial legal system and society, and the scholarship of early legal writers and theorists, that this Clause was understood as serving the collective interest in bringing justice–and later, rehabilitation–to wrongdoers in community by legitimizing and increasing the fairness and clarity of proceedings through the provision of counsel for the accused.
Contending, based on the guarantees of the Judiciary Act of 1789 and the congressional Act of 1790, both passed by a Congress composed of many of the Framers, that the Right-to-Counsel Clause ensured defendants the right to counsel in all criminal proceedings.
Concluding, based on the text and overall structure of the Sixth Amendment, that the right to counsel attaches when someone is formally accused of criminal wrongdoing and that included in this right is a guarantee that the state will fund such assistance.
Analyzing Founding-Era state constitutions and legislation as well as the ratifying debates to conclude that “counsel” in the Right-to-Counsel Clause was understood to refer to licensed practitioners, or, in other words, based on the late eighteenth-century meaning, individuals whose virtue of knowledge of the law and legal practice qualified them to try cases.
Documenting that the the Sixth Amendment right to counsel was intended to correct the inadequacies of the English criminal justice system of the 17th century, in which the right to counsel was not granted to all accused persons.
Arguing based on colonial-era state constitutions that the right to counsel was understood as being the right to assistance for a full defense, incorporating the English abolition of the former practice of only providing assistance of counsel for issues of law but not for issues of fact.