Held: The Constitution does not forbid States from insisting upon representation by counsel for those competent enough to stand trial but who suffer from severe mental illness to the point where they are not competent to conduct trial proceedings by themselves. Pp. 4–13.
(a) This Court’s precedents frame the question presented, but they do not answer it. Dusky v. United States, 362 U. S. 402, and Drope v. Missouri, 420 U. S. 162, 171, set forth the Constitution’s “mental competence” standard forbidding the trial of an individual lacking a rational and factual understanding of the proceedings and sufficient ability to consult with his lawyer with a reasonable degree of rational understanding. But those cases did not consider the issue presented here, namely, the relation of that “mental competence” standard to the self-representation right. Similarly the Court’s foundational “self-representation” case, Faretta, supra — which held that the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments include a “constitutional right to proceed without counsel when” a criminal defendant “voluntarily and intelligently elects to do so,” 422 U. S., at 807 — does not answer the question as to the scope of the self-representation right. Finally, although Godinez, supra, presents a question closer to the one at issue in that it focused upon a borderline-competent defendant who had asked a state trial court to permit him to represent himself and to change his pleas from not guilty to guilty, Godinez provides no answer here because that defendant’s ability to conduct a defense at trial was expressly not at issue in that case, see 509 U. S., at 399–400, and because the case’s constitutional holding that a State may permit a gray-area defendant to represent himself does not tell a State whether it may deny such a defendant the right to represent himself at his trial. Pp. 4–8.
