The Sixth Amendment right “attaches” once the government has committed itself to the prosecution of the case by the initiation of adversarial judicial proceedings "by way of formal charge, preliminary hearing, indictment, information or arraignment,".. "In a line of constitutional cases in this Court stemming back to the Court's landmark opinion in , it has been firmly established that a person's Sixth and Fourteenth Amendment right to counsel attaches only at or after the time that adversary judicial proceedings have been initiated against him. See Powell v. Alabama, supra; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ." ". . . [W]hile members of the Court have differed as to the existence of the right to counsel in the contexts of some of the above cases, all of those cases have involved points of time at or after the initiation of adversary judicial criminal proceedings -- whether by way of formal charge, preliminary hearing, indictment, information, or arraignment." Determining whether a particular event or proceeding constitutes the commencement of adversarial criminal proceedings requires both an examination of the rules of criminal procedure for the jurisdiction in which the crime is charged and the Supreme Court cases dealing with the issue of when formal prosecution begins.; see also . In Maine v. Moulton the court stated “By its very terms, it becomes applicable only when the government's role shifts from investigation to accusation. For it is only then that the assistance of one versed in the "intricacies . . . of law," ibid., is needed to assure that the prosecution's case encounters "the crucible of meaningful adversarial testing." The Sixth Amendment right to counsel does not attach until such time as the "government has committed itself to prosecute, and . . . the adverse positions of government and defendant have solidified ...'" . Once adversarial criminal proceedings commence the right to counsel applies to all critical stages of the prosecution and investigation. A critical stage is "any stage of the prosecution, formal or informal, in court or out, where counsel's absence might derogate from the accused's right to a fair trial."; see also Under the critical stage analysis, virtually every phase of the criminal trial is a critical stage. Additionally courts have generally held that pretrial hearings regarding conditions of pretrial release and suppression of evidence are considered critical stages. On the other hand courts have generally held that certain pre-trial post accusation investigative procedures are not critical stages. Analysis of fingerprints, blood samples, clothing, hair, handwriting, and voice samples have all been ruled to be noncritical stages. FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, (2001)
