Abuse of Discretion – 6th Amendment Violation

Listen to this article

7^th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: Fredrick Walker v. Timothy Price, et al.

Case No.: 17-1345

Officials: MANION and BARRETT, Circuit Judges, and GETTLEMAN, District Judge.

Focus: Abuse of Discretion – 6^th Amendment Violation

A litigant in a civil case has neither a statutory nor a constitutional right to counsel. He can, however, ask the court to recruit counsel to represent him on a pro bono basis. When the court receives such a request from an indigent plaintiff, it must determine whether the plaintiff has made a reasonable attempt to obtain counsel on his own and whether, given the difficulty of the case, the plaintiff is competent to litigate it himself. Pruitt v. Mote, 503 F.3d 647, 649 (7th Cir. 2007) (en banc). If the answer to the first question is yes and the answer to the second is no, then the court must seek counsel to represent the plaintiff.

This case involves the district court’s assessment of the second question. Fredrick Walker, an inmate, brought a civil-rights suit against several prison officers. Over the course of the litigation, Walker asked the court six times to recruit a volunteer lawyer to represent him. The court acted within its discretion when it denied his initial motions. But it abused its discretion when it denied the sixth. At that point, Walker was facing not only a jury trial, but a jury trial by videoconference. That substantially increased the difficulty of his case, despite the simplicity of his claims. Moreover, the basic competence that Walker had demonstrated during the pretrial phase did not necessarily reflect his ability to handle a video trial entirely on his own. Trying a case requires additional skills, and Walker had managed the pretrial phase with the help of a jailhouse lawyer who had since been transferred to another prison. Because the landscape had changed at this late stage of the litigation, the court should have granted Walker’s motion to recruit counsel.

Vacated and Remanded

Full Text

Attorney Derek A. Hawkins is the managing partner at Hawkins Law Offices LLC, where he heads up the firm’s startup law practice. He specializes in business formation, corporate governance, intellectual property protection, private equity and venture capital funding and mergers & acquisitions. Check out the website at www.hawkins-lawoffices.com or contact them at 262-737-8825.