Sixth Amendment Right To Counsel

• Jurisdiction: Maryland

II. Sixth Amendment right to counsel

A. Attachment of the right upon commencement of judicial adversarial proceedings

The Sixth Amendment right to counsel is a trial right, which attaches when the Government, through a prosecutor, initiates formal judicial adversarial proceedings, by charging the defendant by grand jury indictment or filing a criminal information. Brewer v. Williams, 430 U.S. 387, 398-99 (1977); Michigan v. Jackson, 475 U.S. 625, 629 n.9 (1986). In Rothgery v. Gillespie County, 554 U.S. 191, 194 (2008), the Supreme Court held that "attachment of the right also requires that a public prosecutor (as distinct from a police officer) be aware" that formal proceedings have begun against the defendant. In Montejo v. Louisiana, 556 U.S. 778 (2009), the Supreme Court stated:

The initiation of judicial proceedings . . . is the starting point of our whole system of adversary criminal justice. For it is then that the government has committed itself to prosecute, and only then that the adverse positions of government and Defendant have solidified. It is then that a Defendant finds himself faced with the prosecutorial forces of organized society, and immersed in the intricacies of substantive and procedural criminal law.

Id. at 797. In Kirby v. Illinois, 406 U.S. 682, 689 (1972), the Supreme Court stated that the right to counsel, like all Sixth Amendment rights, is a trial right, which ends after sentencing. In Kirby, the Court recognized that the right to...