On February 16, 2018, CPCS Chief Counsel Anthony Benedetti addressed Fulbright scholars and alumni during a luncheon at the Massachusetts Bar Association as part of their Bill of Rights Tour Program. After the scholars/alumni visited Freedom Trail sites connected to the origins of the first 14 Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Chief Counsel spoke to them on the right to counsel and how Massachusetts and 2nd President John Adams were essential in establishing this right.
Chief Counsel Benedetti focused on John Adams’s defense of the British soldiers accused of colonists’ deaths at the Boston Massacre and how it helped lead to the right to counsel becoming part of the Massachusetts Constitution 11 years before the U.S. 6th Amendment was ratified and centuries before Gideon v. Wainwright was decided. He then brought the scholars/alumni through modern day Massachusetts public defense – beginning with the Voluntary Defenders Committee in 1935 to two 1957 Massachusetts cases that further advanced indigent defense – Pugliese v. Commonwealth and Brown v. Commonwealth – to the Mass Defenders and Roxbury Defenders and, finally, to the 1983 creation of the Committee for Public Counsel Services (CPCS).