nal balance between State and federal sovereignty, this Court
must respect and is reluctant to interfere with the States'
determination of local social policy."[822] One year later, the Court
made another inconclusive observation in Smith _v._ O'Grady,[823] in
which it stated that if true, allegations in a petition for _habeas
corpus_ showing that the petitioner, although an uneducated man and
without prior experience in court, was tricked into pleading guilty to a
serious crime of burglary, and was tried without the requested aid of
counsel would void the judgment under which he was imprisoned.

Conceding that the above mentioned opinions "lend color to the
argument," though they did not actually so rule, that "in every case,
whatever the circumstances, one charged with crime, who is unable to
obtain counsel, must be furnished counsel by the State," the Court, in
Betts _v._ Brady,[824] decided in 1942, not only narrowed the scope of
the right of the accused to the "assistance of counsel," but also set at
rest any question as to the constitutional source from which the right
was derived. Offering State courts the following vague guide for
determining when provision of counsel is constitutionally required, the
Court declared that "the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the conviction
and incarceration of one whose trial is offensive to the common and
fundamental ideas of fairness and right, and while want of counsel in a
particular case may result in a conviction lacking in such fundamental
fairness, we cannot say that the amendment embodies an inexorable
command that no trial for any offense, or in any court, can be fairly
conducted and justice accorded a defendant who is not represented by
counsel * * * Asserted denial of due process is to be tested by an
appraisal of the totality of facts in a given case. That which may, in
one setting, constitute a denial of fundamental fairness, shocking to
the universal sense of justice, may, in other circumstances, and in the
light of other considerations, fall short of such denial."[825]
Accordingly, an indigent farm laborer was deemed not to have been denied
due process of law when he was convicted of robbery by a Maryland county
court, sitting without a jury, which was not required by statute[826] to
honor his request for counsel and whose "practice," in fact was to
afford counsel only in murder and rape cases. Finally, the Court
emphatically rejected the notion, suggested, however