Mentally Distured Prevented From Representing Themselves
By: Tommy Elder, Jr.
Announcing that any individual including the mentally ill posseses the constitutional right of Self-representation- the United States Supreme Court threw-out Indiana`s Supreme Court`s verdict in Indiana versus Edwards 07-208. This case entailed the legal travails of Ahmad Edward, a diagnosed schizophrenic.
At the trial phase-Mr. Edward disagreed with his attorney over how to proceed in presenting the legal case. His strategy entailed a self defense pleading while his lawyer wanted to pursue a strategy of ``lack of intent.``The case involved the firing of a weapon at a security guard following Edward`s attempt at stealing a pair of shoes. The court ruled that Ahmad Edwards stood as an individual capable of going to trial in spite of his under going two psychiatric hospitalizations during a span of three years after the gun firing incident took place.
Back in the 1975 case of Faretta versus California- the High Tribunal decreed that an individual possessed the right of self-representation as a primary ``constitutional right.`` Associate U.S. Supreme Court Justice Breyer said that making a legal case at trial ``without a lawyer`s help requires a higher degree of competence.`` Further, he noted that ``dignity was lacking in the `spectacle that could well result` from a mentally ill defendant`s efforts, which he said were `at least as likely to prove humiliating as ennobling.`
In dissent- Associate Justice Antonin Scalia and Associate Justice Clarence Thomas indicated that preventing Mr. Edwards from using ``the defense of his choice `seems to me the epitome of both actual and apparent unfairness.`
More abstracts about the New York Times