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Full Opinion
FARETTA
v.
CALIFORNIA.
Supreme Court of United States.
Jerome B. Falk, Jr., by appointment of the Court, 417 U. S. 906, argued the cause for petitioner. With him on the briefs was Roger S. Hanson.
Howard J. Schwab, Deputy Attorney General of California, argued the cause for respondent. With him on the brief were Evelle J. Younger, Attorney General, Jack R. Winkler, Chief Assistant Attorney General, S. Clark Moore, Assistant Attorney General, and Russell Iungerich and Donald J. Oeser, Deputy Attorneys General.[*]
*807 MR. JUSTICE STEWART delivered the opinion of the Court.
The Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments of our Constitution guarantee that a person brought to trial in any state or federal court must be afforded the right to the assistance of counsel before he can be validly convicted and punished by imprisonment. This clear constitutional rule has emerged from a series of cases decided here over the last 50 years.[1] The question before us now is whether a defendant in a state criminal trial has a constitutional right to proceed without counsel when he voluntarily and intelligently elects to do so. Stated another way, the question is whether a State may constitutionally hale a person into its criminal courts and there force a lawyer upon him, even when he insists that he wants to conduct his own defense. It is not an easy question, but we have concluded that a State may not constitutionally do so.
I
Anthony Faretta was charged with grand theft in an information filed in the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, Cal. At the arraignment, the Superior Court Judge assigned to preside at the trial appointed the public defender to represent Faretta. Well before the date of trial, however, Faretta requested that he be permitted to represent himself. Questioning by the judge revealed that Faretta had once represented himself in a criminal prosecution, that he had a high school education, and that he did not want to be represented by the public defender because he believed that that office was "very loaded down with . . . a heavy case load." The judge *808 responded that he believed Faretta was "making a mistake" and emphasized that in further proceedings Faretta would receive no special favors.[2] Nevertheless, after establishing that Faretta wanted to represent himself and did not want a lawyer, the judge, in a "preliminary ruling," accepted Faretta's waiver of the assistance of counsel. The judge indicated, however, that he might reverse this ruling if it later appeared that Faretta was unable adequately to represent himself.
Several weeks thereafter, but still prior to trial, the judge sua sponte held a hearing to inquire into Faretta's ability to conduct his own defense, and questioned him specifically about both the hearsay rule and the state law governing the challenge of potential jurors.[3] After consideration *809 of Faretta's answers, and observation of his demeanor, the judge ruled that Faretta had not made an intelligent and knowing waiver of his right to the assistance *810 of counsel, and also ruled that Faretta had no constitutional right to conduct his own defense.[4] The judge, accordingly, reversed his earlier ruling permitting self-representation and again appointed the public defender to represent Faretta. Faretta's subsequent request for leave to act as cocounsel was rejected, as were his efforts to make certain motions on his own behalf.[5] Throughout *811 the subsequent trial, the judge required that Faretta's defense be conducted only through the appointed lawyer from the public defender's office. At the conclusion of the trial, the jury found Faretta guilty as charged, and the judge sentenced him to prison.
The California Court of Appeal, relying upon a then-recent California Supreme Court decision that had expressly decided the issue,[6] affirmed the trial judge's ruling that Faretta had no federal or state constitutional right *812 to represent himself.[7] Accordingly, the appellate court affirmed Faretta's conviction. A petition for rehearing was denied without opinion, and the California Supreme Court denied review.[8] We granted certiorari. 415 U. S. 975.
II
In the federal courts, the right of self-representation has been protected by statute since the beginnings of our Nation. Section 35 of the Judiciary Act of 1789, 1 Stat. 73, 92, enacted by the First Congress and signed by President Washington one day before the Sixth Amendment *813 was proposed, provided that "in all the courts of the United States, the parties may plead and manage their own causes personally or by the assistance of . . . counsel. . . ." The right is currently codified in 28 U. S. C. § 1654.
With few exceptions, each of the several States also accords a defendant the right to represent himself in any criminal case.[9] The Constitutions of 36 States explicitly confer that right.[10] Moreover, many state courts have *814 expressed the view that the right is also supported by the Constitution of the United States.[11]
This Court has more than once indicated the same view. In Adams v. United States ex rel. McCann, 317 U. S. 269, 279, the Court recognized that the Sixth Amendment right to the assistance of counsel implicitly embodies a "correlative right to dispense with a lawyer's help." The defendant in that case, indicted for federal mail fraud violations, insisted on conducting his own defense without benefit of counsel. He also requested a bench trial and signed a waiver of his right to trial by jury. The prosecution consented to the waiver of a jury, and the waiver was accepted by the court. The defendant was convicted, but the Court of Appeals reversed the conviction on the ground that a person accused of a felony could not competently waive his right to trial by jury except upon the advice of a lawyer. This Court reversed and reinstated the conviction, holding that "an accused, in the exercise of a free and intelligent choice, and with the considered approval of the court, may waive trial by jury, and so likewise may he competently and intelligently waive his Constitutional right to assistance of counsel." Id., at 275.
The Adams case does not, of course, necessarily resolve the issue before us. It held only that "the Constitution *815 does not force a lawyer upon a defendant." Id., at 279.[12] Whether the Constitution forbids a State from forcing a lawyer upon a defendant is a different question. But the Court in Adams did recognize, albeit in dictum, an affirmative right of self-representation:
"The right to assistance of counsel and the correlative right to dispense with a lawyer's help are not legal formalisms. They rest on considerations that go to the substance of an accused's position before the law. . . .
". . . What were contrived as protections for the accused should not be turned into fetters. . . . To deny an accused a choice of procedure in circumstances in which he, though a layman is as capable as any lawyer of making an intelligent choice, is to impair the worth of great Constitutional safeguards by treating them as empty verbalisms.
". . . When the administration of the criminal law . . . is hedged about as it is by the Constitutional safeguards for the protection of an accused, to deny him in the exercise of his free choice the right to dispense with some of these safeguards . . . is to imprison a man in his privileges and call it the Constitution." Id., at 279-280 (emphasis added).
In other settings as well, the Court has indicated that *816 a defendant has a constitutionally protected right to represent himself in a criminal trial. For example, in Snyder v. Massachusetts, 291 U. S. 97, the Court held that the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment gives the accused a right to be present at all stages of the proceedings where fundamental fairness might be thwarted by his absence. This right to "presence" was based upon the premise that the "defense may be made easier if the accused is permitted to be present at the examination of jurors or the summing up of counsel, for it will be in his power, if present, to give advice or suggestion or even to supersede his lawyers altogether and conduct the trial himself." Id., at 106 (emphasis added). And in Price v. Johnston, 334 U. S. 266, the Court, in holding that a convicted person had no absolute right to argue his own appeal, said this holding was in "sharp contrast" to his "recognized privilege of conducting his own defense at the trial." Id., at 285.
The United States Courts of Appeals have repeatedly held that the right of self-representation is protected by the Bill of Rights. In United States v. Plattner, 330 F. 2d 271, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit emphasized that the Sixth Amendment grants the accused the rights of confrontation, of compulsory process for witnesses in his favor, and of assistance of counsel as minimum procedural requirements in federal criminal prosecutions. The right to the assistance of counsel, the court concluded, was intended to supplement the other rights of the defendant, and not to impair "the absolute and primary right to conduct one's own defense in propria persona." Id., at 274. The court found support for its decision in the language of the 1789 federal statute; in the statutes and rules governing criminal procedure, see 28 U. S. C. § 1654, and Fed. Rule Crim. Proc. 44; in the many state constitutions that expressly guarantee self-representation; *817 and in this Court's recognition of the right in Adams and Price. On these grounds, the Court of Appeals held that implicit in the Fifth Amendment's guarantee of due process of law, and implicit also in the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of a right to the assistance of counsel, is "the right of the accused personally to manage and conduct his own defense in a criminal case." 330 F. 2d, at 274. See also United States ex rel. Maldonado v. Denno, 348 F. 2d 12, 15 (CA2); MacKenna v. Ellis, 263 F. 2d 35, 41 (CA5); United States v. Sternman, 415 F. 2d 1165, 1169-1170 (CA6); Lowe v. United States, 418 F. 2d 100, 103 (CA7); United States v. Warner, 428 F. 2d 730, 733 (CA8); Haslam v. United States, 431 F. 2d 362, 365 (CA9); compare United States v. Dougherty, 154 U. S. App. D. C. 76, 86, 473 F. 2d 1113, 1123 (intimating right is constitutional but finding it unnecessary to reach issue) with Brown v. United States, 105 U. S. App. D. C. 77, 79-80, 264 F. 2d 363, 365-366 (plurality opinion stating right is no more than statutory in nature).
This Court's past recognition of the right of self-representation, the federal-court authority holding the right to be of constitutional dimension, and the state constitutions pointing to the right's fundamental nature form a consensus not easily ignored. "[T]he mere fact that a path is a beaten one," Mr. Justice Jackson once observed, "is a persuasive reason for following it."[13] We confront here a nearly universal conviction, on the part of our people as well as our courts, that forcing a lawyer upon an unwilling defendant is contrary to his basic right to defend himself if he truly wants to do so.
*818 III
This consensus is soundly premised: The right of self-representation finds support in the structure of the Sixth Amendment, as well as in the English and colonial jurisprudence from which the Amendment emerged.
A
The Sixth Amendment includes a compact statement of the rights necessary to a full defense:
"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right . . . to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence."
Because these rights are basic to our adversary system of criminal justice, they are part of the "due process of law" that is guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to defendants in the criminal courts of the States.[14] The rights to notice, confrontation, and compulsory process, when taken together, guarantee that a criminal charge may be answered in a manner now considered fundamental to the fair administration of American justice— through the calling and interrogation of favorable witnesses, the cross-examination of adverse witnesses, and the orderly introduction of evidence. In short, the Amendment constitutionalizes the right in an adversary criminal trial to make a defense as we know it. See California v. Green, 399 U. S. 149, 176 (Harlan, J., concurring).
*819 The Sixth Amendment does not provide merely that a defense shall be made for the accused; it grants to the accused personally the right to make his defense. It is the accused, not counsel, who must be "informed of the nature and cause of the accusation," who must be "confronted with the witnesses against him," and who must be accorded "compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor." Although not stated in the Amendment in so many words, the right to self-representation—to make one's own defense personally—is thus necessarily implied by the structure of the Amendment.[15] The right to defend *820 is given directly to the accused; for it is he who suffers the consequences if the defense fails.
The counsel provision supplements this design. It speaks of the "assistance" of counsel, and an assistant, however expert, is still an assistant. The language and spirit of the Sixth Amendment contemplate that counsel, like the other defense tools guaranteed by the Amendment, shall be an aid to a willing defendant—not an organ of the State interposed between an unwilling defendant and his right to defend himself personally. To thrust counsel upon the accused, against his considered wish, thus violates the logic of the Amendment. In such a case, counsel is not an assistant, but a master;[16] and the right to make a defense is stripped of the personal character upon which the Amendment insists. It is true that when a defendant chooses to have a lawyer manage and present his case, law and tradition may allocate to the counsel the power to make binding decisions of trial strategy in many areas. Cf. Henry v. Mississippi, 379 U. S. 443, 451; Brookhart v. Janis, 384 U. S. 1, 7-8; Fay v. Noia, 372 U. S. 391, 439. This allocation can only be justified, however, by the defendant's consent, at the *821 outset, to accept counsel as his representative. An unwanted counsel "represents" the defendant only through a tenuous and unacceptable legal fiction. Unless the accused has acquiesced in such representation, the defense presented is not the defense guaranteed him by the Constitution, for, in a very real sense, it is not his defense.
B
The Sixth Amendment, when naturally read, thus implies a right of self-representation. This reading is reinforced by the Amendment's roots in English legal history.
In the long history of British criminal jurisprudence, there was only one tribunal that ever adopted a practice of forcing counsel upon an unwilling defendant in a criminal proceeding. The tribunal was the Star Chamber. That curious institution, which flourished in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, was of mixed executive and judicial character, and characteristically departed from common-law traditions. For those reasons, and because it specialized in trying "political" offenses, the Star Chamber has for centuries symbolized disregard of basic individual rights.[17] The Star Chamber not merely allowed but required defendants to have counsel. The defendant's answer to an indictment was not accepted unless it was signed by counsel. When counsel refused to sign the answer, for whatever reason, the defendant was *822 considered to have confessed.[18] Stephen commented on this procedure: "There is something specially repugnant to justice in using rules of practice in such a manner as *823 to debar a prisoner from defending himself, especially when the professed object of the rules so used is to provide for his defense." 1 J. Stephen, A History of the Criminal Law of England 341-342 (1883). The Star Chamber was swept away in 1641 by the revolutionary fervor of the Long Parliament. The notion of obligatory counsel disappeared with it.
By the common law of that time, it was not representation by counsel but self-representation that was the practice in prosecutions for serious crime. At one time, every litigant was required to "appear before the court in his own person and conduct his own cause in his own words."[19] While a right to counsel developed early in civil cases and in cases of misdemeanor, a prohibition against the assistance of counsel continued for centuries in prosecutions for felony or treason.[20] Thus, in the 16th and 17th centuries the accused felon or traitor stood alone, with neither counsel nor the benefit of other rights—to notice, confrontation, and compulsory process—that we now associate with a genuinely fair adversary proceeding. The trial was merely a "long argument between the prisoner and the *824 counsel for the Crown."[21] As harsh as this now seems, at least "the prisoner was allowed to make what statements he liked. . . . Obviously this public oral trial presented many more opportunities to a prisoner than the secret enquiry based on written depositions, which, on the continent, had taken the place of a trial. . . ."[22]
With the Treason Act of 1695, there began a long and important era of reform in English criminal procedure. The 1695 statute granted to the accused traitor the rights to a copy of the indictment, to have his witnesses testify under oath, and "to make . . . full Defense, by Counsel learned in the Law."[23] It also provided for court appointment of counsel, but only if the accused so desired.[24]*825 Thus, as new rights developed, the accused retained his established right "to make what statements he liked."[25] The right to counsel was viewed as guaranteeing a choice between representation by counsel and the traditional practice of self-representation. The ban on counsel in felony cases, which had been substantially eroded in the courts,[26] was finally eliminated by statute in 1836.[27] In more recent years, Parliament has provided for court appointment of counsel in serious criminal cases, but only at the accused's request.[28] At no point in this process of reform in England was counsel ever forced upon the *826 defendant. The common-law rule, succinctly stated in R. v. Woodward, [1944] K. B. 118, 119, [1944] 1 All E. R. 159, 160, has evidently always been that "no person charged with a criminal offence can have counsel forced upon him against his will."[29] See 3 Halsbury's Laws of England ¶ 1141, pp. 624-625 (4th ed. 1973); R. v. Maybury, 11 L. T. R. (n. s.) 566 (Q. B. 1865).
C
In the American Colonies the insistence upon a right of self-representation was, if anything, more fervent than in England.
The colonists brought with them an appreciation of the virtues of self-reliance and a traditional distrust of lawyers. When the Colonies were first settled, "the lawyer was synonymous with the cringing Attorneys-General and Solicitors-General of the Crown and the arbitrary Justices of the King's Court, all bent on the conviction of those who opposed the King's prerogatives, and twisting the law to secure convictions."[30] This prejudice gained strength in the Colonies where "distrust *827 of lawyers became an institution."[31] Several Colonies prohibited pleading for hire in the 17th century.[32] The prejudice persisted into the 18th century as "the lower classes came to identify lawyers with the upper class."[33] The years of Revolution and Confederation saw an upsurge of antilawyer sentiment, a "sudden revival, after the War of the Revolution, of the old dislike and distrust of lawyers as a class."[34] In the heat of these sentiments the Constitution was forged.
This is not to say that the Colonies were slow to recognize the value of counsel in criminal cases. Colonial judges soon departed from ancient English practice and allowed accused felons the aid of counsel for their defense.[35] At the same time, however, the basic right of *828 self-representation was never questioned. We have found no instance where a colonial court required a defendant in a criminal case to accept as his representative an unwanted lawyer. Indeed, even where counsel was permitted, the general practice continued to be self-representation.[36]
The right of self-representation was guaranteed in many colonial charters and declarations of rights. These early documents establish that the "right to counsel" meant to the colonists a right to choose between pleading through a lawyer and representing oneself.[37] After the *829 Declaration of Independence, the right of self-representation, along with other rights basic to the making of a defense, entered the new state constitutions in wholesale fashion.[38] The right to counsel was clearly thought to *830 supplement the primary right of the accused to defend himself,[39] utilizing his personal rights to notice, confrontation, and compulsory process. And when the Colonies or newly independent States provided by statute rather than by constitution for court appointment of counsel in criminal cases, they also meticulously preserved the right of the accused to defend himself personally.[40]
*831 The recognition of the right of self-representation was not limited to the state lawmakers. As we have noted, § 35 of the Judiciary Act of 1789, signed one day before the Sixth Amendment was proposed, guaranteed in the federal courts the right of all parties to "plead and manage their own causes personally or by the assistance of . . . counsel." 1 Stat. 92. See 28 U. S. C. § 1654. At the time James Madison drafted the Sixth Amendment, some state constitutions guaranteed an accused the right to be heard "by himself" and by counsel; others provided that an accused was to be "allowed" counsel.[41] The various state proposals for the Bill of Rights had similar variations in terminology.[42]*832 In each case, however, the counsel provision was embedded in a package of defense rights granted personally to the accused. There is no indication that the differences in phrasing about "counsel" reflected any differences of principle about self-representation. No State or Colony had ever forced counsel upon an accused; no spokesman had ever suggested that such a practice would be tolerable, much less advisable. If anyone had thought that the Sixth Amendment, as drafted, failed to protect the long-respected right of self-representation, there would undoubtedly have been some debate or comment on the issue. But there was none.
In sum, there is no evidence that the colonists and the Framers ever doubted the right of self-representation, or imagined that this right might be considered inferior to the right of assistance of counsel. To the contrary, the colonists and the Framers, as well as their English ancestors, always conceived of the right to counsel as an "assistance" for the accused, to be used at his option, in defending himself. The Framers selected in the Sixth Amendment a form of words that necessarily implies the right of self-representation. That conclusion is supported by centuries of consistent history.
IV
There can be no blinking the fact that the right of an accused to conduct his own defense seems to cut against the grain of this Court's decisions holding that the Constitution requires that no accused can be convicted and imprisoned unless he has been accorded the right to the assistance of counsel. See Powell v. Alabama, 287 U. S. 45; Johnson v. Zerbst, 304 U. S. 458; Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U. S. 335; Argersinger v. Hamlin, 407 U. S. 25. For it is surely true that the basic thesis of those decisions is that the help of a lawyer is essential to assure *833 the defendant a fair trial.[43] And a strong argument can surely be made that the whole thrust of those decisions must inevitably lead to the conclusion that a State may constitutionally impose a lawyer upon even an unwilling defendant.
But it is one thing to hold that every defendant, rich or poor, has the right to the assistance of counsel, and quite another to say that a State may compel a defendant to accept a lawyer he does not want. The value of state-appointed counsel was not unappreciated by the Founders,[44] yet the notion of compulsory counsel was utterly foreign to them. And whatever else may be said of those who wrote the Bill of Rights, surely there can be no *834 doubt that they understood the inestimable worth of free choice.[45]
It is undeniable that in most criminal prosecutions defendants could better defend with counsel's guidance than by their own unskilled efforts. But where the defendant will not voluntarily accept representation by counsel, the potential advantage of a lawyer's training and experience can be realized, if at all, only imperfectly. To force a lawyer on a defendant can only lead him to believe that the law contrives against him. Moreover, it is not inconceivable that in some rare instances, the defendant might in fact present his case more effectively by conducting his own defense. Personal liberties are not rooted in the law of averages. The right to defend is personal. The defendant, and not his lawyer or the State, will bear the personal consequences of a conviction. It is the defendant, therefore, who must be free personally to decide whether in his particular case counsel is to his advantage. And although he may conduct his own defense ultimately to his own detriment, his choice must be honored out of "that respect for the individual which is the lifeblood of the law." Illinois v. Allen, 397 U. S. 337, 350-351 (BRENNAN, J., concurring).[46]
*835 V
When an accused manages his own defense, he relinquishes, as a purely factual matter, many of the traditional benefits associated with the right to counsel. For this reason, in order to represent himself, the accused must "knowingly and intelligently" forgo those relinquished benefits. Johnson v. Zerbst, 304 U. S., at 464-465. Cf. Von Moltke v. Gillies, 332 U. S. 708, 723-724 (plurality opinion of Black, J.). Although a defendant need not himself have the skill and experience of a lawyer in order competently and intelligently to choose self-representation, he should be made aware of the dangers and disadvantages of self-representation, so that the record will establish that "he knows what he is doing and his choice is made with eyes open." Adams v. United States ex rel. McCann, 317 U. S., at 279.
Here, weeks before trial, Faretta clearly and unequivocally declared to the trial judge that he wanted to represent himself and did not want counsel. The record affirmatively shows that Faretta was literate, competent, and understanding, and that he was voluntarily exercising his informed free will. The trial judge had warned Faretta that he thought it was a mistake not to accept *836 the assistance of counsel, and that Faretta would be required to follow all the "ground rules" of trial procedure.[47] We need make no assessment of how well or poorly Faretta had mastered the intricacies of the hearsay rule and the California code provisions that govern challenges of potential jurors on voir dire.[48] For his technical legal knowledge, as such, was not relevant to an assessment of his knowing exercise of the right to defend himself.
In forcing Faretta, under these circumstances, to accept against his will a state-appointed public defender, the California courts deprived him of his constitutional right to conduct his own defense. Accordingly, the judgment before us is vacated, and the case is remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.
It is so ordered.
MR. CHIEF JUSTICE BURGER, with whom MR. JUSTICE BLACKMUN and MR. JUSTICE REHNQUIST join, dissenting.
This case, like Herring v. New York, post, p. 853, announced today, is another example of the judicial tendency to constitutionalize what is thought "good." That effort fails on its own terms here, because there is nothing desirable or useful in permitting every accused person, even the most uneducated and inexperienced, to insist upon conducting his own defense to criminal charges.[1] Moreover, there is no constitutional basis for *837 the Court's holding, and it can only add to the problems of an already malfunctioning criminal justice system. I therefore dissent.
I
The most striking feature of the Court's opinion is that it devotes so little discussion to the matter which it concedes is the core of the decision, that is, discerning an independent basis in the Constitution for the supposed right to represent oneself in a criminal trial.[2] See ante, at 818-821, and n. 15. Its ultimate assertion that such a right is tucked between the lines of the Sixth Amendment is contradicted by the Amendment's language and its consistent judicial interpretation.
As the Court seems to recognize, ante, at 820, the conclusion that the rights guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment are "personal" to an accused reflects nothing more than the obvious fact that it is he who is on trial and therefore has need of a defense.[3] But neither that nearly *838 trivial proposition nor the language of the Amendment, which speaks in uniformly mandatory terms, leads to the further conclusion that the right to counsel is merely supplementary and may be dispensed with at the whim of the accused. Rather, this Court's decisions have consistently included the right to counsel as an integral part of the bundle making up the larger "right to a defense as we know it." For example, in In re Oliver, 333 U. S. 257 (1948), the Court reversed a summary contempt conviction at the hands of a "one-man grand jury," and had this to say:
"We . . . hold that failure to afford the petitioner a reasonable opportunity to defend himself against the charge of false and evasive swearing was a denial of due process of law. A person's right to reasonable notice of a charge against him, and an opportunity to be heard in his defense—a right to his day in court—are basic in our system of jurisprudence; and these rights include, as a minimum, a right to examine the witnesses against him, to offer testimony, and to be represented by counsel." Id., at 273.
See also Argersinger v. Hamlin, 407 U. S. 25, 27-33 (1972); Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U. S. 335, 344 (1963).
The reason for this hardly requires explanation. The fact of the matter is that in all but an extraordinarily small number of cases an accused will lose whatever defense he may have if he undertakes to conduct the trial himself. The Court's opinion in Powell v. Alabama, 287 U. S. 45 (1932), puts the point eloquently:
"Even the intelligent and educated layman has small and sometimes no skill in the science of law. If charged with crime, he is incapable, generally, of determining for himself whether the indictment is good or bad. He is unfamiliar with the rules of evidence. Left without the aid of counsel he may *839 be put on trial without a proper charge, and convicted upon incompetent evidence, or evidence irrelevant to the issue or otherwise inadmissible. He lacks both the skill and knowledge adequately to prepare his defense, even though he have a perfect one. He requires the guiding hand of counsel at every step in the proceedings against him. Without it, though he be not guilty, he faces the danger of conviction because he does not know how to establish his innocence. If that be true of men of intelligence, how much more true is it of the ignorant and illiterate, or those of feeble intellect." Id., at 69.
Obviously, these considerations do not vary depending upon whether the accused actively desires to be represented by counsel or wishes to proceed pro se. Nor is it accurate to suggest, as the Court seems to later in its opinion, that the quality of his representation at trial is a matter with which only the accused is legitimately concerned. See ante, at 834. Although we have adopted an adversary system of criminal justice, see Gideon v. Wainwright, supra, the prosecution is more than an ordinary litigant, and the trial judge is not simply an automaton who insures that technical rules are adhered to. Both are charged with the duty of insuring that justice, in the broadest sense of that term, is achieved in every criminal trial. See Brady v. Maryland, 373 U. S. 83, 87, and n. 2 (1963); Berger v. United States, 295 U. S. 78, 88 (1935). That goal is ill-served, and the integrity of and public confidence in the system are undermined, when an easy conviction is obtained due to the defendant's ill-advised decision to waive counsel. The damage thus inflicted is not mitigated by the lame explanation that the defendant simply availed himself of the "freedom" "to go to jail under his own banner . . . ." United States ex rel. *840 Maldonado v. Denno, 348 F. 2d 12, 15 (CA2 1965). The system of criminal justice should not be available as an instrument of self-destruction.
In short, both the "spirit and the logic" of the Sixth Amendment are that every person accused of crime shall receive the fullest possible defense; in the vast majority of cases this command can be honored only by means of the expressly guaranteed right to counsel, and the trial judge is in the best position to determine whether the accused is capable of conducting his defense. True freedom of choice and society's interest in seeing that justice is achieved can be vindicated only if the trial court retains discretion to reject any attempted waiver of counsel and insist that the accused be tried according to the Constitution. This discretion is as critical an element of basic fairness as a trial judge's discretion to decline to accept a plea of guilty. See Santobello v. New York, 404 U. S. 257, 262 (1971).
II
The Court's attempt to support its result by collecting dicta from prior decisions is no more persuasive than its analysis of the Sixth Amendment. Considered in context, the cases upon which the Court relies to "beat its path" either lead it nowhere or point in precisely the opposite direction.
In Adams v. United States ex rel. McCann, 317 U. S. 269 (1942), and Carter v. Illinois, 329 U. S. 173 (1946), the defendants had competently waived counsel but later sought to renounce actions taken by them while proceeding pro se. In both cases this Court upheld the convictions, holding that neither an uncounseled waiver of jury trial nor an uncounseled guilty plea is inherently defective under the Constitution. The language which the Court so carefully excises from those opinions relates, not to an affirmative right of self-representation, but to *841 the consequences of waiver.[4] In Adams, for example, Mr. Justice Frankfurter was careful to point out that his reference to a defendant's "correlative right to dispense with a lawyer's help" meant only that "[h]e may waive his Constitutional right to assistance of counsel. . . ," 317 U. S., at 279. See United States v. Warner, 428 F. 2d 730, 733 (CA8 1970). But, as the Court recognizes, the power to waive a constitutional right does not carry with it the right to insist upon its opposite. Singer v. United States, 380 U. S. 24, 34-35 (1965).
Similarly, in Carter the Court's opinion observed that the Constitution "does not require that under all circumstances counsel be forced upon a defendant," citing Adams. 329 U. S., at 174-175 (emphasis added). I, for one, find this statement impossible to square with the Court's present holding that an accused is absolutely entitled to dispense with a lawyer's help under all conditions. Thus, although Adams and Carter support the Court's conclusion that a defendant who represents himself may not thereafter disaffirm his deliberate trial decisions, see ante, at 834-835, n. 46, they provide it no comfort regarding the primary issue in this case.[5]