Bruce Robert Jacob (born March 26, 1935) is a former Assistant Attorney General for the State of Florida during the early 1960s. He represented Louie L. Wainwright, the Director of the Florida Division of Corrections, in the Supreme Court case of Gideon v. Wainwright,[1] decided in March 1963, regarding the right to counsel of indigent defendants in non-capital felony cases in state courts. The attorney representing the Petitioner, Clarence Gideon, was Abe Fortas, a Washington, D.C. lawyer who later became a Justice of the Supreme Court.[2] The previous 1942 Supreme Court case of Betts v. Brady[3] required the appointment of counsel for an indigent defendant at state expense if there was a “special circumstance” present in the case which made it necessary for counsel to be provided for the defendant to receive a fair trial. For example, if the defendant was indigent and was extremely young, or lacked education or experience, was unfamiliar with court procedures, or if the charges against him were complex, the trial court was required under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to appoint counsel. Jacob argued against any extension of the defendant's right to counsel.[4] The Court in Gideon overruled Betts and required state courts to appoint attorneys for defendants in all felony prosecutions.
Gideon had been convicted of breaking the Bay Harbor Poolroom, located in the small community of Bay Harbor, near Panama City, Florida. His conviction was set aside and the case was sent back to the trial court in Panama City for a new trial. At the second trial, he was represented by appointed attorney Fred Turner[5] and Gideon was acquitted.
The decision in Gideon led to the establishment of many more public defender offices throughout the United States than had existed previously. Anthony Lewis wrote a book about the case, entitled "Gideon’s Trumpet", published in 1964. In 1980 it was made into a movie of the same name, starring Henry Fonda as Clarence Gideon.
Early life
Bruce Jacob was born in Chicago, Illinois, on March 26, 1935, and was raised in Hinsdale, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He and his family moved to Sarasota, Florida, when he was 16 and he graduated from Sarasota High School in 1953. During his senior year, he played the violin in the Florida West Coast Symphony. Also, he participated in football, basketball, and track, and in track was the 1953 Florida high school state champion in the half-mile run.[6]
College and legal education
For his first year of college, he attended Principia College, in Elsah, Illinois, and there he lettered in basketball and track. Beginning his second year he transferred to Florida State University, where he lettered in track. Also, he played in the Florida State Symphony orchestra and became a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity. He received a B.A. degree from Florida State in 1957.[7] He studied law at Stetson University College of Law, St. Petersburg, Florida, and received the J.D. degree in 1959. At Stetson, during his senior year, he was the president of the student body.[8]
Jacob began his legal career in the Florida Attorney General’s office, in Tallahassee, in 1960 and there he represented the state in 19 appeals before the Florida Supreme Court and District Courts of Appeal of Florida. In 1962 he joined the firm of Holland, Bevis, and Smith, in Bartow and Lakeland Florida as an associate. (That firm now is Holland and Knight, in various cities in the United States and other countries). From 1965 to 1969 Jacob was an Assistant and associate professor at the Emory University School of Law, in Atlanta, Georgia. As a graduate student at the Harvard Law School, from 1968 to 1971 he served as a research associate in the Center for Criminal Justice and as a staff attorney in the Community Legal Assistance Office, a Harvard legal services office in Cambridge, Massachusetts.[10]
Jacob subsequently was associate professor, then Professor, and Director of Clinical Programs at the Ohio State University College of Law in Columbus, Ohio from 1971 to 1978. From 1978 to 1981 he was Dean and Professor of Law of the Mercer University School of Law, in Macon, Georgia. From 1981 to 1994 he was Vice President of Stetson University and Dean and Professor at the Stetson College of Law. From 1994, when he stepped down as Dean, until he retired in 2018, he was a professor of law at Stetson. Jacob presently is Dean Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of the Stetson University College of Law.[11]
In 2009 Jacob assisted in teaching a course on International Organizations in Lucerne and Geneva, Switzerland. In 2010 he was a panelist in American law at the Northwest University of Politics and Law, Xi’an, China; Southwest University of Political Science and Law, Chongqing, China; Dalian Maritime University, Dalian City, Manchuria, China; and Tsinghua University, Beijing. In 2011 he was an instructor in the Program on American Law, sponsored by the Northwest University of Politics and Law, in Xi’an, China.[12]
Legal work for indigent defendants and prison inmates
To comply with the Gideon decision, in May 1963, the Florida Legislature enacted a law creating a statewide public defender system and included was a provision allowing lawyers in private firms to become unpaid Special Assistant Public Defenders.[13] Jacob, who by then was in private practice in Bartow, Florida, volunteered and was appointed to represent defendants in criminal cases under this statute.[14]
In 1966, as assistant professor at Emory Law School, he established the Legal Assistance for Inmates (L.A.I.) The program, providing free legal help to indigent prisoners at the United States Penitentiary in Atlanta. While acting as the director and supervisor of the students in that program he was appointed by the United States Supreme Court as counsel for the Petitioner in the case of Kaufman v. United States.[15] The Supreme Court ruled with Jacob, who argued that his client had been subjected to an unreasonable search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. A movie was made, in 1986, about Harold Kaufman following his release from prison. Its title is “A Deadly Business” and it starred Alan Arkin as Kaufman.
Jacob also represented inmates in appellate cases such as Rosa v United States,[16] and in federal trial-level cases such as White v Blackwell[17] and Lawrence v Blackwell[18] challenging prison rules and practices on constitutional grounds. The Emory program and the National Defender Project entered into an experiment in which two jailhouse lawyers from the Atlanta Penitentiary who were knowledgeable about federal criminal law were released from confinement to assist in the work of the program. The National Defense Project, through Deputy Director John Cleary,[19] obtained the release of the two jailhouse lawyers and provided the funding to pay their salaries. They worked with students at the law school. One of these men, Benjamin Rayborn,[20] later served for over 30 years as a highly respected paralegal at the office of the Federal Defender in San Diego, California.
While a graduate student at the Harvard Law School Jacob was the co-founder of the Prison Legal Assistance Project (P.L.A.P.), for Massachusetts prison inmates. This project was patterned after the Emory L.A.I. Program. Also, he was a staff attorney, supervising students at the Community Legal Assistance Office (C.L.A.O.), a legal service office operated by the Harvard Law School.[21]
From 1971 to 1978, at The Ohio State University College of Law, he developed clinical programs and taught two of them – the Criminal Defense Clinic and the Criminal Appeals and Post-Conviction Remedies clinic. In these clinics, students represented indigent defendants and inmates under the supervision of Jacob and supervising attorneys.[22]
While Dean and Professor at Mercer Law School and Stetson College of Law until he retired from Stetson, Jacob continued to provide legal help to indigent defendants and prison inmates.
Honors and awards
In 2006 the members of an American Inn of Court in Tampa honored Professor Jacob by naming their Inn the "Bruce R. Jacob Criminal Appellate American Inn of Court." In 2016 the name became "Bruce R. Jacob - Chris W. Altenbernd Criminal Appellate Inn of Court." He was a member of The Constitution Project's "Blue Ribbon Panel" on indigent defense in the United States. In 2009 the panel issued its report, entitled "Justice Denied: America's Continuing Neglect of Our Constitutional Right to Counsel." In 2013 he was one of four persons presented with "Constitutional Champion" awards by the Constitution Project,[23] in Washington, D.C. He received the 2013 "Champion of Indigent Defense Award" from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.[24] Also, in 2013 he received the Delano Stewart Award from the George Edgecomb Bar Association, Tampa, and the "Power 100 Award" from the organization, "On Being a Black Lawyer" of Washington, D.C. These two awards were for efforts in making the legal profession more diverse. In 2014 he received the “Wm. Reece Smith, Jr. Public Service Award” from Stetson and the “Gardner W. Beckett, Jr. Civil Liberties Award” from the Pinellas County, Florida chapter of the A.C.L.U. He received the 2018 “Law Faculty Professionalism Award” from The Florida Bar.[25]
He was honored by the Stetson faculty when in 2009 Stetson began hiring entry-level Visiting Assistant Professors who are known as "Bruce R. Jacob Fellows." They spend two years at Stetson, developing courses, teaching, and writing in preparation for a career as a law professor. He gave the commencement speech address for the College of Law in May 2019, and received the honorary LL.D degree from Stetson University.[26]
In 2014 the Illinois Public Defender Association created an award to be given to outstanding Illinois public defenders and named it the “Bruce Robert Jacob Award.” At a semi-annual meeting of the Association in October 2019 in Springfield, Illinois, Jacob was given this award.[27]
Writings
Jacob has authored or co-othered 20 law review articles, book reviews, and a blog. Here are some of his writings:
“Memories of and ReflectionsAbout Gideon v Wainwright”, 33 Stetson Law Review 181 (2003).
“Judges at Nuremberg:Stetson’s Connection to the War Crime Trials,” 44 Stetson Law Review 695 (2015)
“The GideonTrials,” 99 Iowa Law Review 2059 (July 2014).
“Remembering a Great Dean: Harold L. ‘Tom’ Sebring,” 30 Stetson Law Review 71 (2000).
Co-author (with K.M. Sharma) of “Justice After Trial: Prisoners Need for Legal Services,” 18 Kansas Law Review 493 (1970).
“Prison Discipline and Inmate Rights,” 5 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 227 (1970)
Blog – “Thoughts on Seila Law v The Consumers Finance Protection Bureau: Limitations on the Power of the President,”Brucerjacob.wordpress.com.
Military service
In 1959 and 1960 Jacob spent six months on active duty in the U.S. Army at Ft. Jackson, South Carolina, for basic training, clerk-typist school, and work as a clerk typist and court reporter for special court-martial proceedings. He graduated and was commissioned a second lieutenant, infantry, from the officers' candidate school of the Florida National Guard, Camp Blanding, Florida in 1962. Subsequently, he transferred to the Judge Advocate General's Corps of the U.S. Army Reserve. In 1971 he resigned from the Army Reserve with the rank of captain.[28]
Related Research Articles
Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in which the Court ruled that the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution requires U.S. states to provide attorneys to criminal defendants who are unable to afford their own. The case extended the right to counsel, which had been found under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to impose requirements on the federal government, by imposing those requirements upon the states as well.
A public defender is a lawyer appointed to represent people who otherwise cannot reasonably afford to hire a lawyer to defend themselves in a trial. Several countries provide people with public defenders, including the UK, Belgium, Hungary and Singapore, and some states of Australia. Brazil is the only country in which an office of government-paid lawyers with the specific purpose of providing full legal assistance and representation to the needy free of charge is established in the constitution. The Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, requires the US government to provide legal counsel to indigent defendants in criminal cases. Public defenders in the United States are lawyers employed by or under contract with county, state or federal governments.
Clarence Earl Gideon was a poor drifter accused in a Florida state court of felony breaking and entering. While in prison, he appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, resulting in the landmark 1963 decision Gideon v. Wainwright holding that a criminal defendant who cannot afford to hire a lawyer must be provided one at no cost.
Powell v. Alabama, 287 U.S. 45 (1932), was a landmark United States Supreme Court decision in which the Court reversed the convictions of nine young black men for allegedly raping two white women on a freight train near Scottsboro, Alabama. The majority of the Court reasoned that the right to retain and be represented by a lawyer was fundamental to a fair trial and that at least in some circumstances, the trial judge must inform a defendant of this right. In addition, if the defendant cannot afford a lawyer, the court must appoint one sufficiently far in advance of trial to permit the lawyer to prepare adequately for the trial.
Dietrich v The Queen is a 1992 High Court of Australia constitutional case which established that a person accused of serious criminal charges must be granted an adjournment until appropriate legal representation is provided if they are unrepresented through no fault of their own and proceeding would result in the trial being unfair.
Betts v. Brady, 316 U.S. 455 (1942), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case that denied counsel to indigent defendants prosecuted by a state. The reinforcement that such a case is not to be reckoned as denial of fundamental due process was famously overruled by Gideon v. Wainwright. In the dissent, Justice Hugo Black famously opined that "A practice cannot be reconciled with "common and fundamental ideas of fairness and right which subjects innocent men to increased dangers of conviction merely because of their poverty."
In criminal law, the right to counsel means a defendant has a legal right to have the assistance of counsel and, if the defendant cannot afford a lawyer, requires that the government appoint one or pay the defendant's legal expenses. The right to counsel is generally regarded as a constituent of the right to a fair trial. Historically, however, not all countries have always recognized the right to counsel. The right is often included in national constitutions. Of the 194 constitutions currently in force, 153 have language to this effect.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) is the court of last resort for all criminal matters in Texas. The Court, which is based in the Supreme Court Building in Downtown Austin, is composed of a presiding judge and eight judges.
The Stetson University College of Law is the law school of Stetson University.
Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668 (1984), was a landmark Supreme Court case that established the standard for determining when a criminal defendant's Sixth Amendment right to counsel is violated by that counsel's inadequate performance.
Harold Leon Sebring, nicknamed Tom Sebring, was a Florida Supreme Court justice, and an American judge at one of the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials of German war criminals after World War II. Sebring was a native of Kansas and an alumnus of Kansas State Agricultural College. While Sebring attended law school at the University of Florida, he also served as the head coach of the Florida Gators football team that represented the university.
Pro se legal representation means to argue on one's own behalf in a legal proceeding, as a defendant or plaintiff in civil cases, or a defendant in criminal cases, rather than have representation from counsel or an attorney.
Timothy Belcher Dyk is an American lawyer and jurist serving since 2000 as a U.S. circuit judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
Marsy's Law, the California Victims' Bill of Rights Act of 2008, enacted by voters as Proposition 9 through the initiative process in the November 2008 general election, is an amendment to the state's constitution and certain penal code sections. The act protects and expands the legal rights of victims of crime to include 17 rights in the judicial process, including the right to legal standing, protection from the defendant, notification of all court proceedings, and restitution, as well as granting parole boards far greater powers to deny inmates parole. Critics allege that the law unconstitutionally restricts defendant's rights by allowing prosecutors to withhold exculpatory evidence under certain circumstances, and harms victims by restricting their rights to discovery, depositions, and interviews.
The Assistance of Counsel Clause of the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides: "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right...to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence."
Abbe Lyn Smith is an American criminal defense attorney and professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. Smith is Director of the Criminal Defense and Prisoner Advocacy Clinic and Co-Director of the E. Barrett Prettyman Fellowship Program.
In the United States, a public defender is a lawyer appointed by the courts and provided by the state or federal governments to represent and advise those charged with a crime or crimes who cannot afford to hire a private attorney. Public defenders are full-time attorneys employed by the state or federal governments. The public defender system is one of several types of criminal legal aid, the most common other system being appointed private counsel paid for by the government.
Vida B. Johnson is an American criminal defense attorney and associate professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. Johnson works in the Criminal Defense and Prisoner Advocacy Clinic and Criminal Justice Clinic, and supervises attorneys in the E. Barrett Prettyman Post-Graduate Fellowship Program. Johnson regularly writes in the area of criminal law and procedure.
Klopfer v. North Carolina, 386 U.S. 213 (1967), was a decision by the United States Supreme Court involving the application of the Speedy Trial Clause of the United States Constitution in state court proceedings. The Sixth Amendment in the Bill of Rights states that in criminal prosecutions "...the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy trial" In this case, a defendant was tried for trespassing and the initial jury could not reach a verdict. The prosecutor neither dismissed nor reinstated the case but used an unusual procedure to leave it open, potentially indefinitely. Klopfer argued that this denied him his right to a speedy trial. In deciding in his favor, the Supreme Court incorporated the speedy trial protections of the Sixth Amendment against the states.
Gideon's Trumpet is a 1980 American made-for-television historical drama film based on the biographical book of the same name written by Anthony Lewis. The film depicts the historical events before and during the 1963 United States Supreme Court case of Gideon v. Wainwright that brought the right of an attorney to criminal defendants who could not afford it and did not meet special requirements to get one for free. After the ruling, implements of the case were enacted publicly, nationally, and even globally.
↑ Michael I. Swygert and W. Gary Vause, Florida’s First Law School: A History of Stetson University College of Law (Carolina Academic Press, 2006), at 475
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