A competency requirement, courtesy of the incompetent
Monday, June 30th, 2008 By James Nesbitt
On June 19th, interim Ohio Attorney General Nancy H. Rogers praised the Supreme Court’s opinion in Indiana v. Edwards in a press release titled “U.S. Supreme Court Rules Mentally Incompetent Defendants Have No Right To Represent Themselves.”
Rogers’ tone is such that she believes denying constitutional rights to defendants is a good thing. The case establishes two different tiers of competency; a lower threshold that requires the defendant to be competent to stand trial, which generally means to be able to understand the charges against him and to assist his counsel, while the upper threshold requires a greater degree of competency, a level sufficient, in the eyes of the state, for the defendant to represent himself.
Before Indiana v. Edwards, the essential requirement for a defendant to waive his right to representation was that he do so “knowingly and voluntarily.” This standard was crafted to give deference to other constitutional due process rights, including particularly the right to act without an attorney. The court has now decided that this standard is not strict enough, and in response, dangerously widens the gap between “competency to stand trial” and “competency to self-represent.” This standard will allow a state strip away rights of its citizens in accordance with an arbitrary definition of “fairness.”
Indiana holds self-defense by a mentally incompetent defendant is unfair, partly because his defense would be of lower quality. But as Justice Scalia points out in his dissent, neither the Constitution nor the court’s prior opinions establishes the right to quality representation. Self-representation is often inherently inferior to representation by a lawyer; this reality will swallow the whole, and eventually courts will nullify the entire right to self-representation.
This ruling takes the decision to waive the right to counsel and to represent oneself away from the individual and gives it to the state. It should come as no surprise that any state Attorney General would advocate this shift in power, but Ohio has outdone its neighbors in contributing to the abuse of its citizens’ rights. Marc Dann’s office penned an amicus curiae brief for this case in support of the competency standard on behalf of Ohio and 18 other states, which the majority used as ammunition for their argument. With Nancy Rogers’ press release, she reveals that she has as little respect for the rights of the citizens she supposedly represents as her predecessor did.
Tags: Due Process, Nancy Rogers, Supreme Court
