When counsel has been assigned to represent an indigent defendant, has developed a close working relationship, and faces no obstacles to continuing the representation, can a court arbitrarily assign different counsel without any inquiry or grounds or does the defendant have a Sixth Amendment right to continuity of assigned counsel?

QUESTION PRESENTED This Court has long recognized the “settled law that an indigent defendant has the same right to effective representation by an active advocate as a defendant who can afford to retain counsel of his or her choice.” McCoy v. Court of Appeals of Wis., Dist. 1, 486 U.S. 429, 435 (1988). This Court has further acknowledged that “[e]xcept for the source of payment,” the relationship between a defendant and appointed counsel is “identical to that existing between any other lawyer and client,” Polk County v. Dodson, 454 U.S. 312, 318 (1981), and characterized this “necessarily close working relationship” as one with “the need for confidence, and the critical importance of trust.” Luis v. United States, 578 U.S. 5, 11 (2016). Indeed, “[t]here are few of the business relations of life involving a higher trust and confidence than that of attorney and client.” Stockton v. Ford, 52 U.S. 232, 247 (1850). Yet these principles have been continuously eroded by courts across the nation holding that indigent defendants who have been assigned counsel and who have benefitted from this “close working relationship” with assigned counsel do not have a right to continued representation by their attorney. Although exceptions are made for case management, conflict of interest, and court scheduling, some courts extinguish an existing attorney-client relationship for no reason whatsoever. This case is just the latest example. Petitioner’s counsel had been assigned to represent him at lineups in the instant case. She had also been assigned to represent him at a related recent trial that resulted in acquittals of the top murder counts. And there were no obstacles preventing her from continuing to represent him. Rather than taking this ongoing relationship into account, the lower court assigned petitioner a different attorney ~ seemingly because she was “some attorney that [the judge] had never heard of.” The instant case is yet another decision that minimizes the trust, confidence, and importance of an indigent defendant’s ongoing relationship with his or her appointed attorney, treats all assigned counsel as interchangeable regardless of the history, and condones a judge’s substitution of counsel for no valid reason. The question presented is: When counsel has been assigned to represent an indigent defendant, has developed a close working relationship, and faces no obstacles to continuing the representation, can a court arbitrarily assign different counsel without any inquiry or grounds or does the defendant have a Sixth Amendment right to continuity of assigned counsel? “a