In the case of Swenson, Warden v. Stidham (1972), the United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of a defendant's right to effective counsel during all stages of criminal proceedings. The petitioner, Robert Eugene Stidham, was convicted for robbery and his conviction was upheld by state courts despite claims that he had been denied effective assistance from his court-appointed attorney at trial. He argued that his lawyer failed to interview key witnesses or present their testimony which could have potentially exonerated him. Upon reaching the Supreme Court, it unanimously held that if proven true, these allegations would indeed constitute a violation of Stidham’s Sixth Amendment rights to adequate legal representation. Therefore, they remanded the case back to lower courts for further fact-finding on whether such ineffective assistance actually occurred.

In the case of Swenson, Warden v. Stidham, there was no recorded dissenting opinion from any justice on the Supreme Court bench. The court unanimously ruled in favor of Stidham, holding that a state prisoner's petition for habeas corpus should not have been dismissed without an evidentiary hearing to determine whether his constitutional rights had been violated during his trial due to ineffective assistance of counsel.