Purpose Of Sixth Amendments

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The Sixth Amendment was a part of the Bill of Rights, which was added to the Constitution in 1791. The purpose of the Sixth Amendment is to protect the rights of criminal defendants. One of the components of the amendment involves the right of defendants to be represented by a defense attorney which assists clients through the criminal justice process.

Heading: What is an amendment?

An amendment is a change; therefore an amendment to the constitution is a change or addition to the legal document. The power to alter the Constitution of the United States is derived from Article V of the Constitution, in which the congress shall propose amendments to constitute. In order to amend the Constitution, an amendment must be proposed by either …show more content…
Constitution is the part of the Bill of Rights that sets forth rights related to criminal prosecutions. The Bill of Rights contains some of the most vital and important freedoms guaranteed to U.S. citizens. The Supreme Court has applied the protections of the Sixth Amendment to the states through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Sixth Amendment states that,

“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and 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 defense.”

Preeminent in the Bill of Rights is the idea that no one’s liberty can ever be taken away without the process being fair. A jury made up of everyday citizens, protections against self-incrimination, being informed of the nature of the offense for which one is accused, and the right to a speedy and public trial are all American ideas of justice. And so all of them were enshrined in the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, which became law when they were ratified by the states in …show more content…
As distinct English settlements, the laws governing the colonies by and large were based upon the contemporary rules of English common law. In England, however, the law held that a person accused of treason or a serious crime was to be denied the assistance of a lawyer in defending himself against his accusers. Colonial governments broke with contemporary English common law, and instead wrote into their statutes and charter a right to have the assistance of an attorney in any criminal case.
The Right to Counsel does and has protected citizens, but it wasn’t until the Gideon decision in 1963, where the Supreme Court held that the government would supply an attorney if one could not afford counsel, that the right to counsel became
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