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Opinion of the Court
Schons, Senior Assistant Attorney General, and Laura Whitcomb Halgren, Supervising Deputy Attorney General.*
Justice Stevens delivered the opinion of the Court.
The Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments of our Constitution guarantee that a person brought to trial in any state or federal court must be afforded the right to the assistance of counsel before he can be validly convicted and punished by imprisonment.1 In Faretta v. California, 422 U. S. 806 (1975), we decided that the defendant also "has a constitutional right to proceed without counsel when he voluntarily and intelligently elects to do so." Id., at 807. Although that statement arguably embraces the entire judicial proceeding, we also phrased the question as whether a State may "constitutionally hale a person into its criminal courts and there force a lawyer upon him, even when he insists that he wants to conduct his own defense." Ibid. Our conclusion in Faretta extended only to a defendant's "constitutional right to conduct his own defense." Id., at 836. Accordingly, our specific holding was confined to the right to defend oneself at trial. We now address the different question whether the reasoning in support of that holding also applies when the defendant becomes an appellant and assumes the burden of persuading a reviewing court that the conviction should be reversed. We have concluded that it does not.
I
Martinez describes himself as a self-taught paralegal with 25 years' experience at 12 different law firms. See App. 13.
*Kent S. Scheidegger and Charles L. Hobson filed a brief for the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation as amicus curiae urging affirmance.
Barbara E. Bergman and Ephraim Margolin filed a brief for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers as amicus curiae.
1 See, e. g., Powell v. Alabama, 287 U. S. 45 (1932); Johnson v. Zerbst, 304 U. S. 458 (1938); Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U. S. 335 (1963); Argersinger v. Hamlin, 407 U. S. 25 (1972).
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