On March 18, 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Gideon v. Wainwright, ruled unanimously that state courts were required to provide legal counsel to criminal defendants who could not afford to hire an attorney on their own.

In 1922, Mohandas K. Gandhi was sentenced in India to six years imprisonment for civil disobedience. (He was released after serving two years.)

In 1925, the Tri-State Tornado struck southeastern Missouri, southern Illinois and southwestern Indiana, resulting in some 700 deaths.

In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order authorizing the War Relocation Authority, which was put in charge of interning Japanese-Americans, with Milton S. Eisenhower (the younger brother of Dwight D. Eisenhower) as its director.

In 1965, the first spacewalk took place as Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov went outside his Voskhod 2 capsule, secured by a tether.

In 1974, most of the Arab oil-producing nations ended their 5-month-old embargo against the United States that had been sparked by American support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War.

In 1996, rejecting an insanity defense, a jury in Dedham, Massachusetts, convicted John C. Salvi III of murdering two women in attacks at two Boston-area abortion clinics in December 1994. (Salvi later committed suicide in his prison cell.)

In 2018, Vladimir Putin rolled to a crushing reelection victory for six more years as Russia’s president.

Today’s Birthdays: Composer John Kander is 94. Nobel peace laureate and former South African president F.W. de Klerk is 85. Jazz musician Bill Frisell is 70. Actor Geoffrey Owens is 60. TV personality Mike Rowe is 59. Singer-actor Vanessa L. Williams is 58. Olympic gold medal speedskater Bonnie Blair is 57. Rapper-actor-talk show host Queen Latifah is 51.