In the 2001 case of Alabama v. Shelton, the United States Supreme Court ruled that a suspended sentence that may result in imprisonment potentially triggers the right to appointed counsel for indigent defendants under the Sixth Amendment. The defendant, LeReed Shelton, was charged with misdemeanor assault and tried without an attorney in Alabama state court. He received a 30-day jail sentence which was then suspended by imposition of two years' unsupervised probation. On appeal, he argued his conviction violated his Sixth Amendment right to counsel because he had not been offered court-appointed representation at trial due to his inability to afford one himself. The U.S Supreme Court agreed with him in a 5-4 decision stating that even though Shelton's prison term was suspended, it still represented potential 'loss of liberty', thus triggering his constitutional rights under the Sixth Amendment.

In the case of Alabama v. Shelton, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor delivered a dissenting opinion, joined by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. The dissent argued that the majority's decision to require counsel for defendants in all cases where imprisonment is possible, even if not actually imposed as part of suspended or probationary sentences, was an unwarranted expansion of the right to counsel under the Sixth Amendment. They contended that this ruling would place undue burden on states' resources without significantly improving fairness in criminal proceedings. Furthermore, they disagreed with extending Gideon v Wainwright’s guarantee of appointed counsel beyond situations where actual imprisonment is at stake because it could lead to unnecessary appointments of counsel for minor offenses which rarely result in incarceration.