The 6th Amendment

EVERYONE is entitled to a lawyer

By Pamela Hilliard Owens

Issue #45 April 7, 2022

“Dun-Dun!”

Today, the United States Senate, on a vote of 53-46 (Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky did not cast a vote during the roll call), confirmed the nomination of U.S. District Court of Appeals Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). The new Justice Jackson will be replacing retiring Justice Steven Breyer, for whom she clerked several years ago. Her ascension to the SCOTUS bench will not change the 6-3 right-wing majority of the current justices. 

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During the 2020 presidential election campaign, then-Vice-President Joe Biden promised that he would nominate a Black woman for the SCOTUS. Justice Brown Jackson will be the first and only Black woman ever to sit on the highest court in the land.

Although Judge Jackson is the most qualified and most experienced of all of the current justices, only 3 of the 50 Republican Senators voted for her confirmation. During her confirmation hearings in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, because they could not attack her qualifications, most of the Republicans on the committee attacked her credibility, her faith, her character, and most importantly, her previous decisions, especially pertaining to her rulings on creators and viewers of child pornography.

The Republicans are falsely calling her part of the “radical socialist left-wing” while conveniently ignoring the four radical right-wing justices currently on the bench who are intent on reversing previous SCOTUS decisions in order to erase the rights of millions of Americans.

The Republicans are now going as far as painting Justice Jackson and even the members of their own party who voted for her confirmation as pedophiles, conflating child pornographers and actual pedophiles as the same.

The Republicans are particularly incensed that Justice Jackson was previously one of the Federal pool of attorneys who defended the alleged terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay.

Justice Jackson is now one of only two previous defense attorneys to sit on the bench; the first one being the late Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Why Do Republicans Hate the Constitution?

By attacking Justice Jackson for her experience as a defense attorney, the Republicans are completely ignoring the 6th Amendment of the Constitution that guarantees legal counsel to all criminal defendants, from accused shoplifters to accused murderers to accused terrorists (both foreign and domestic). 

In 1945, in preparation for the trials of German Nazis, four WWII allies (the United States, the Soviet Union, France, and Great Britain) established that the laws and procedures of the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) would essentially follow the directives of the U.S. 6th Amendment. The chief American prosecutor was Robert H. Jackson, who temporarily stepped down from the Supreme Court to join the international tribunal. Justice Robert Jackson was a key part of the international governing body that agreed and declared that even the Nazis accused of war crimes had the right to counsel and also to a trial in front of a judge and/or jury.

What the 6th Amendment Says

The 6th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1791 as part of the ten amendments of the Bill of Rights. These ten amendments were added almost immediately after the official ratification of the new Constitution because the Founders realized that, oops! our bad, they forgot to include some very important rights.

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

According to the Legal Information Institute:

The Sixth Amendment guarantees the rights of criminal defendants, including the right to a public trial without unnecessary delay, the right to a lawyer, the right to an impartial jury, and the right to know who your accusers are and the nature of the charges and evidence against you. It has been most visibly tested in a series of cases involving terrorism, but much more often figures in cases that involve (for example) jury selection or the protection of witnesses, including victims of sex crimes as well as witnesses in need of protection from retaliation.

In her role as a defense attorney, Ketanji Brown Jackson was following the Constitution of the United States, which is the law of the land. All defense attorneys at all levels also follow the dictates of the 6th Amendment as they do their job, no matter how repulsive their clients, who are considered innocent until proven guilty, may be viewed by others.