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Chapters 1 and 2

• Clarence Earl Gideon is a fifty-one-year-old white man from Florida who believes that he was denied due process of the law because he was not assigned an attorney during a criminal trial.

• Gideon, holding to the idea that the Constitution guarantees his of that right, files a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court.

• Gideon sends his neatly written petition from prison in Raiford and H.G. Cochran, director of the Florida Division of Corrections is named a respondent in the case.
• The law states that only those in "special circumstances" such as people who are illiterate, ignorant, young, mentally ill, or accused of a capital offense are to be provided attorneys.

• A transcript of the proceedings indicates that Gideon asked for an attorney and was denied by the trial judge.

• Because federal law supersedes state law, a case must go through the state's court system...

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