t is a denial of due process, even though the law
of the State does not require such appointment.

Dissents were again registered in the following brace of decision which
a minority of the Justices declared their inability to reconcile. In the
first, Gryger _v._ Burke,[849] the Court held that when one, sentenced
to life imprisonment as a fourth offender under a State habitual
criminal act, had been arrested eight times for crimes of violence,
followed by pleas of guilty or conviction, and in two of such former
trials had been represented by counsel, the State's failure to offer or
to provide counsel for him on his plea to a charge of being a fourth
offender does not render his conviction and sentence as such invalid,
even though the Court may have misconstrued the statute as making a life
sentence mandatory rather than discretionary. Emphasizing that there
were "no exceptional circumstances * * * present," the majority asserted
that "it rather overstrains our credulity to believe that [such a
defendant would be ignorant] of his right [to request and] to engage
counsel." In the second, Townsend _v._ Burke,[850] the Supreme Court
declared that although failure of a State court to offer or to assign
counsel to one charged with the noncapital offenses of burglary and
robbery, or to advise him of his right to counsel before accepting a
plea of guilty may not render his conviction invalid for lack of due
process, the requirement is violated when, while disadvantaged by lack
of counsel who might have corrected the court's errors, defendant is
sentenced on the basis of materially untrue assumptions concerning his
criminal record.[851]

Concordant as to the results reached, if not always as to the reasoning
supporting them, are the Court's latest rulings. In Uveges _v._
Pennsylvania,[852] it was held that inasmuch as the record showed that a
State court did not attempt to make a 17-year-old youth understand the
consequences of his plea of guilty to four separate indictments
charging burglary, for which he could be given sentences aggregating 80
years, and that the youth was neither advised of his right to counsel
nor offered counsel at any time between arrest and conviction, due
process was denied him. Likewise, in Gibbs _v._ Burke[853] was
overturned, as contrary to due process, the conviction for larceny of a
man in his thirties who conducted his own defense, having neither
requested, nor having been offered counsel. On the