Due Process in Contemporary American Essay

In modern criminal procedure and practice, the Sixth Amendment also provides specific requirements of police, such as where criminal defendants express the desire to consult legal counsel. Irrespective of whether or not such a request precedes or follows the common recitation of Miranda warnings by arresting authorities, the Supreme Court

has now long-regarded any expression of request for legal counsel as the immediate cut-off point of any further questioning (Colon, 2004; Dershowitz, 2002).

Furthermore, the Sixth Amendment right to competent counsel need not specifically be expressed or invoked by the defendant. in-between 1961 and 1979, the Supreme Court expanded the requirements in that regard by applying standards that had been developed in-between 1932 and 1942 with respect to federal prosecutions to state prosecutions (Freidman, 2005).Those decisions entitled criminal defendants to the assignment of competent counsel anytime the defendant is financially incapable of acquiring his own legal representation or merely intellectually incapable of mounting a competent defense without such representation (Freidman, 2005).

References

Conlon, E. (2004). Blue Blood. New York: Riverhead.

Dershowitz, a. (2002). Shouting Fire: Civil Liberties in a Turbulent Age. New York:

Little Brown & Co.

Friedman, L.M. (2005). A History of American Law. New York: Simon & Schuster.….....