Cite as: 528 U. S. 259 (2000)
Syllabus
ments of the Fourteenth Amendment, to experiment with solutions to difficult policy problems. See, e. g., Griffin, supra. The Court, because of its status as a court—particularly a court in a federal system— avoids imposing a single solution on the States from the top down and instead evaluates state procedures one at a time, while leaving "the more challenging task of crafting appropriate procedures . . . to the laboratory of the States . . . in the first instance," Cruzan v. Director, Mo. Dept. of Health, 497 U. S. 261 (O'Connor, J., concurring). Pp. 272-276.
2. California's Wende procedure does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. Pp. 276-284.
(a) The precise rationale for the Griffin and Douglas line of cases has never been explicitly stated, but this Court's case law reveals that the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment largely converge to require that a State's procedure "afford adequate and effective appellate review to indigent defendants," Griffin, supra, at 20 (plurality opinion). A State's procedure provides such review so long as it reasonably ensures that an indigent's appeal will be resolved in a way that is related to the merit of that appeal. In determining whether a particular procedure satisfies this standard, it is important to focus on the underlying goals that the procedure should serve—to ensure that those indigents whose appeals are not frivolous receive the counsel and merits brief required by Douglas, and also to enable the State to "protect itself so that frivolous appeals are not subsidized and public moneys not needlessly spent," Griffin, supra, at 24 (Frankfurter, J., concurring in judgment). For an indigent's right to counsel on direct appeal does not include the right to bring a frivolous appeal and, concomitantly, does not include the right to counsel for bringing a frivolous appeal. Anders' obvious goal was to prevent this limitation on the right to appellate counsel from swallowing the right itself, and the Court does not retreat from that goal here. Pp. 276-278.
(b) The Wende procedure reasonably ensures that an indigent's appeal will be resolved in a way that is related to the appeal's merit. A comparison of that procedure to those evaluated in this Court's chief cases demonstrates that it affords indigents the adequate and effective appellate review required by the Fourteenth Amendment. The Wende procedure is undoubtedly far better than those procedures the Court has found inadequate. A significant fact in finding the old California procedure inadequate in Anders, and also in finding inadequate the procedures that the Court reviewed in Eskridge v. Washington Bd. of Prison Terms and Paroles, 357 U. S. 214, and Lane v. Brown, 372 U. S.
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