Correct. The right to assistance of counsel is the exact right you're waiving in order to represent yourself in the first place. What you can still do is to claim that the judge shouldn't have granted your demand to represent yourself in the first place. And just as defendants represented by counsel will very often throw up a hail-Mary ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claim for habeas relief (even though it almost never works), self-represented defendants will very often make an inappropriate-grant-of-self-representation claim on appeal or habeas (even though it's probably even less likely to work).morrand wrote:On a related note, I'm almost positive that there is actual precedent for the idea that, while you have a right to represent yourself at trial, and while you have a right to the assistance of competent counsel, you can't demand both at the same time. Or, in other words, that it's no use to claim on appeal that your counsel was incompetent when you represented yourself. Although, if a Private Attorney General represented the strawman....
Sovereign citizens seem to be a pretty consistent exception to that trend, though, probably because it pains them too much to argue that they're so obviously incompetent that the judge should have seen it.
