Abstract:
The defense counsel provided to the accused and defendant under article 134/1 and 173 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CPC) can be classified merely as procedural action done by the court and judicial police regardless the actual concern of right to counsel which includes the right to effective counsel. It could be said that, at present, the doctrine of right to effective counsel has yet been adopted into the CPC both in judicial police investigation process and in the court trial. In addition, there is no measure to guarantee the effective performance of the defense counsel either who attends during the police interrogation or who acts as the defense counsel during trial. Moreover, there still are other problems relating to the defense counsel such as quality of the defense counsel, selection and assignment system, and payment rate, which are not based on experience and expertise of each assigned lawyer. Finally, there is no sufficient measure to develop the lawyer ethics ideal and legal professional which will support and facilitate the effectiveness of defense counsel performance. In the United States and United Kingdom, the right to effective counsel is essential to protect the defendant in criminal case. The indigent status is a pre-requisite condition to get the legal service assistance. The state must provide the legal assistance to the accused and defendant who are indigent and cannot afford attorney themselves. Right to effective counsel has been gradually developed under the right to counsel under the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution. This doctrine right to effective counsel has been collaborated and substantiated with the Professional Code of conduct proposed by American Bar Association or ABA Model which aims to champion the effective performance of the defense counsel. Furthermore, the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) has deliberately studied and given the guideline to develop public defense by including and emphasizing an ABA Model right to effective counsel as well. The study of the development of right to effective counsel, qualification of lawyer, performance measuring standard, public defender idea, ABA Code of Professional Conduct and the model to enhance the defense counsel performance to apply to the Thai society is inherently essential for the success to guarantee the right to counsel under the CPC. This research aims at to study those rules so that the doctrine of right to effective counsel becomes true not only in according with the procedure process, but also the substantive law, which some proposals have been elaborated in the final part of this thesis.