Stephen Bright's Yale course on capital punishment turns to the right to counsel guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment and the equal protection and due process clauses of the Fourteenth. The session traces the Supreme Court's slow extension of that right, from capital cases in 1932 through federal prosecutions in 1938 to Gideon v. Wainwright's 1963 requirement that states provide lawyers to indigent felony defendants. It then asks what that guarantee is worth in practice, covering the standard for effective assistance of counsel, access to expert assistance, and the difficulty defendants face proving their lawyers were incompetent. Derwyn Bunton, Chief District Defender for Orleans Parish, describes the funding constraints public defenders face in capital cases, and Stephen Singer discusses the post-Katrina restructuring of New Orleans public defense and the judicial resistance it met.