In his dissenting opinion, Justice Hugo Black strongly disagreed with the majority's decision not to require states to provide counsel to indigent defendants in all cases. Black argued that the right to counsel is a fundamental right, essential for a fair trial, and should be guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment. He wrote, “[i]f this case had come to us from a federal court, it is clear we should have to reverse it, because the Sixth Amendment makes the right to counsel in criminal cases inviolable by the Federal Government. I believe that the Fourteenth Amendment made the Sixth applicable to the states.”

Black expressed concern that denying counsel based on the defendant's inability to afford one contradicts the principles of fairness and justice, particularly when the stakes involve the deprivation of liberty. He believed that the right to counsel should not be treated as an optional privilege, subject to arbitrary limitations by individual states, but as a basic procedural necessity that is essential for the integrity of the judicial process. He explained that “[a] practice cannot be reconciled with ‘common and fundamental ideas of fairness and right,’ which subjects innocent men to increased dangers of conviction merely because of their poverty. Whether a man is innocent cannot be determined from a trial in which, as here, denial of counsel has made it impossible to conclude, with any satisfactory degree of certainty, that the defendant's case was adequately presented.”