Cite as: 528 U. S. 259 (2000)
Opinion of the Court
Finally, the Wende procedure appears to be, in some ways, better than the one we approved in McCoy and, in other ways, worse. On balance, we cannot say that the latter, assuming, arguendo, that they outweigh the former, do so sufficiently to make the Wende procedure unconstitutional. The Wisconsin procedure we evaluated in McCoy, which required counsel filing an Anders brief to explain why the issues he raised in his brief lacked merit, arguably exacerbated the ethical problem already present in the Anders procedure. The Wende procedure, as we have explained, attempts to mitigate that problem. Further, it appears that in the McCoy scheme counsel discussed—and the appellate court reviewed—only the parts of the record cited by counsel in support of the "arguable" issues he raised. See 486 U. S., at 440, 442. The Wende procedure, by contrast, requires a more thorough treatment of the record by both counsel and court. See 25 Cal. 3d, at 440-441, 600 P. 2d, at 1074-1075; id., at 445, 600 P. 2d, at 1077 (Clark, J., concurring in judgtioning Justice: Legal and Market Mechanisms for Allocating Criminal Appellate Counsel, 34 Am. Crim. L. Rev. 1161, 1167-1168 (1997) (Anders has created a "tragedy of the commons" that, "far from guaranteeing adequate appellate representation for all criminal defendants, instead ensures that indigent criminal defendants will receive mediocre appellate representation, whether their claims are good or bad" (footnote omitted)); Pritchard, supra, at 1169 (noting Anders' similar effect on appellate courts); Pritchard, supra, at 1162 ("[J]udicial fiat cannot cure scarcity; it merely disguises the symptoms of the disease"); Doherty, Wolf! Wolf!—The Ramifications of Frivolous Appeals, 59 J. Crim. L., C. & P. S. 1, 2 (1968) ("[T]he people who will suffer the most are the indigent prisoners who have been unjustly convicted; they will languish in prison while lawyers devote time and energy to hopeless causes on a first come-first served basis" (footnote omitted)). We cannot say whether the Wende procedure is better or worse than the Anders procedure in this regard (although we are aware of policy-based arguments that it is worse as to appellate courts, see People v. Williams, 59 Cal. App. 4th 1202, 1205-1206, 69 Cal. Rptr. 2d 690, 692 (1997); Brief for Retired Justice Armand Arabian et al. as Amici Curiae), but it is clear that, to the extent this criticism has merit, our holding today that the Anders procedure is not exclusive will enable States to continue to experiment with solutions to this problem.
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