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Opinion of the Court
in felony cases only. We declined to limit Griffin to cases in which the defendant faced incarceration. "The invidiousness of the discrimination that exists when criminal procedures are made available only to those who can pay," the Court said in Mayer, "is not erased by any differences in the sentences that may be imposed." 404 U. S., at 197. Petty offenses could entail serious collateral consequences, the Mayer Court noted. Ibid. The Griffin principle, Mayer underscored, "is a flat prohibition," 404 U. S., at 196, against "making access to appellate processes from even [the State's] most inferior courts depend upon the [convicted] defendant's ability to pay," id., at 197. An impecunious party, the Court ruled, whether found guilty of a felony or conduct only "quasi criminal in nature," id., at 196, "cannot be denied a record of sufficient completeness to permit proper [appellate] consideration of his claims," id., at 198 (internal quotation marks omitted).5
In contrast to the "flat prohibition" of "bolted doors" that the Griffin line of cases securely established, the right to
5 Griffin did not impose an inflexible requirement that a State provide a full trial transcript to an indigent defendant pursuing an appeal. See Griffin v. Illinois, 351 U. S. 12, 20 (1956) (State need not purchase a stenographer's transcript in every case where an indigent defendant cannot buy it; State "Supreme Court may find other means of affording adequate and effective appellate review to indigent defendants."). In Draper v. Washington, 372 U. S. 487 (1963), we invalidated a state rule that tied an indigent defendant's ability to obtain a transcript at public expense to the trial judge's finding that the defendant's appeal was not frivolous. Id., at 498-500. We emphasized, however, that the Griffin requirement is not rigid. "Alternative methods of reporting trial proceedings," we observed, "are permissible if they place before the appellate court an equivalent report of the events at trial from which the appellant's contentions arise." 372 U. S., at 495. Moreover, we held, an indigent defendant is entitled only to those parts of the trial record that are "germane to consideration of the appeal." Ibid.; see also Mayer v. Chicago, 404 U. S. 189, 194 (1971) ("A record of sufficient completeness does not translate automatically into a complete verbatim transcript." (internal quotation marks omitted)).
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