critical stages
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 393 U.S. 5 - Arsenault v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts · 1968Most cited · 401 citing opinions
The right to counsel at the trial...on appeal...and at the other 'critical' stages of the criminal proceedings...have all been made retroactive, since the 'denial of the right must almost invariably deny a fair trial.
How often courts cite the case defining “critical stages”
Court decisions citing the opinion that defined “critical stages” — 401 in all, by decade. Counts are citations to the defining case as a whole, not verified uses of the term. The dip in the most recent years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the latest years.