Gideon's Trumpet

How a great right reaches one actual person. Lewis follows a single handwritten petition from a Florida prison cell, written by a man with no lawyer, to the Supreme Court ruling that guaranteed counsel to anyone facing felony charges. The book makes due process concrete: not an abstraction but the difference between a fair trial and a railroaded one, for Clarence Earl Gideon and for everyone after him. The clearest account of how the Constitution actually touches a life.

The reporter who made the Supreme Court legible to ordinary readers and won two Pulitzer Prizes doing it. Gideon's Trumpet follows a single handwritten petition from a Florida prison cell to the ruling that guaranteed counsel to anyone facing felony charges. Make No Law tells the story of the case that built modern free-press protection. He showed how a great right reaches one actual person.