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Opinion of the Court
client's claims as frivolous).11 California, through the Wende procedure, has made a good-faith effort to mitigate this problem by not requiring the Wende brief to raise legal issues and by not requiring counsel to explicitly describe the case as frivolous. See Wende, 25 Cal. 3d, at 441-442, 600 P. 2d, at 1074-1075.
Another criticism of the Anders procedure has been that it is incoherent and thus impossible to follow. Those making this criticism point to our language in Anders suggesting that an appeal could be both "wholly frivolous" and at the same time contain arguable issues, even though we also said that an issue that was arguable was "therefore not frivolous." Anders, supra, at 744.12 In other words, the Anders procedure appears to adopt gradations of frivolity and to use two different meanings for the phrase "arguable issue." The Wende procedure attempts to resolve this problem as well, by drawing the line at frivolity and by defining arguable issues as those that are not frivolous.13
11 As one former public defender has explained, "an attorney confronted with the Anders situation has to do something that the Code of Professional Responsibility describes as unethical; the only choice is as to which canon he or she prefers to violate." Pengilly, Never Cry Anders: The Ethical Dilemma of Counsel Appointed to Pursue a Frivolous Criminal Appeal, 9 Crim. Justice J. 45, 64 (1986). See also, e. g., Commonwealth v. Moffett, 383 Mass. 201, 206, 418 N. E. 2d 585, 590 (1981) (Anders requires a "Janus-faced approach" by counsel); Hermann, Frivolous Criminal Appeals, 47 N. Y. U. L. Rev. 701, 711 (1972).
12 Justice Stewart, in his dissent in Anders, was the first to make this criticism of the procedure set out by the Anders majority: "[I]f the record did present any such 'arguable' issues, the appeal would not be frivolous." 386 U. S., at 746; see id., at 746, n. See also, e. g., C. Wolfram, Modern Legal Ethics 817 (1986) ("The Anders directives are confusing, if not contradictory").
13 See supra, at 279-280. A further criticism of Anders has been that it is unjust. More particularly, critics have claimed that, in setting out the Anders procedure, we were oblivious to the problem of scarce resources (with regard to both counsel and courts) and, as a result, crafted a rule that diverts attention from meritorious appeals of indigents and ensures poor representation for all indigents. See, e. g., Pritchard, Auc-
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