a seventeen-year old boy who was without legal
assistance, and was never advised of his right to counsel, who received
from the trial court no explanation of the consequences of his plea of
guilty, and who never subjected the State's witnesses to
cross-examination, effected a denial of constitutional "rights essential
to a fair hearing."

Even more conclusive evidence of the revival of the fair trial doctrine
of Betts _v._ Brady is to be found in the majority opinions contained in
Foster _v._ Illinois[840] and Gayes _v._ New York.[841] In the former
the Court ruled that where it appears that the trial court, before
accepting pleas of guilty to charges of burglary and larceny by
defendants, aged 34 and 58 respectively, advised each of his rights of
trial and of the consequences of such a plea, the fact that the record
reveals no express offer of counsel would not suffice to show that the
accused were deprived of rights essential to the fair hearing required
by the due process clause. Reiterating that the absolute right to
counsel accorded by the Sixth Amendment does not apply in prosecutions
in State courts, five of the Justices declared that all the due process
clause of the Fourteenth Amendment "exacts from the States is a
conception of fundamental justice" which is neither "satisfied by merely
formal procedural correctness, nor * * * confined by any absolute rule
such as that which the Sixth Amendment contains in securing to an
accused [in the federal courts] 'the Assistance of Counsel for his
defense.'"[842] On the same day, four Justices, with Justice Burton
concurring only in the result, held in Gayes _v._ New York,[843] that
one sentenced in 1941 as a second offender under a charge of burglary
was not entitled to vacation of a judgment rendered against him in
1938, when charged with the first offense, on the ground that when
answering in the negative the trial court's inquiry as to whether he
desired the aid of counsel, he did not understand his constitutional
rights. On his subsequent conviction in 1941, which took into account
his earlier sentence of 1938, the defendant was deemed to have had full
opportunity to contest the constitutionality of his earlier sentence.
Consistently with these two cases, the Court in Marino _v._ Ragen,[844]
decided later in the same year, held that the absence of counsel, in
conjunction with the following set of facts, operated to deprive a
defendant of due process. In this latter