Why We Can't Let Them Tamper with Habeas Corpus

[NNN0LHI]

http://hnn.us/articles/38970.html

By Staughton Lynd


“Habeas corpus”: it sounds like Latin (which it is), complicated, and user-unfriendly. An exotic form of the verb “to have” – the second person singular of the present subjunctive, according to my dictionary – and something about a “body,” apparently. But hardly anything to get excited about.

In reality the ancient judicial writ known as “habeas corpus” is the most elemental, existentially relevant pleading in Anglo-American legal practice. It is the form of words that seeks to protect us from indefinite, anonymous, uncharged imprisonment, and that gives a prisoner sentenced to death a last chance to reverse the trial verdict, or at least, the sentence.

Protection Against Indefinite Confinement

The writ stands in opposition to the practice of taking a human being into government custody and thereafter disappearing him or her in indefinite confinement. It is the remedy sought by the Argentinian mothers who assembled each year in the Plaza de Mayo to demand information about their missing children.

The writ is directed to the warden running the prison in which the missing person is thought to be confined. Imagining myself as that prisoner, a petition for writ of habeas corpus says, in effect: “Mr. Warden, we want to see Mr. Lynd. Bring him into open court. Tell us what he is charged with. Assure us, by actually showing us his body, that he is still alive, that he has not been tortured.”

Even in the repressive ambience of apartheid the government of South Africa dared to do away with habeas corpus only gradually. Prime Minister Vorster introduced a 90-day detention law in 1963. Then the initial detention term was doubled to 180 days, and in 1967 detention was made open-ended. Deaths in detention began within a few months of passage of the 1963 law. In 1977 prisoner Stephen Biko was murdered.

[Sadie4629]

1. Didn't Lincoln suspend habeus corpus--

--during the Civil War?