Opinion ID: 2368807
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Bill of Rights

Text: The excessive bail clause was a noncontroversial provision that provoked very little discussion when Congress considered the adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1789. The only reference in the record of congressional debate attacked its asserted vagueness, [21] but that statement provoked no response and the amendment was approved shortly afterward. Appellant adopts the argument of Professor Foote that the narrowly drawn excessive bail clause was the product of oversight and inadvertence, which masked the framers' true intention to include a right to bail in the Bill of Rights. See Foote, supra note 9, at 970-71, 984-89. Professor Foote acknowledges that Congress had available examples of an explicit right to bail in colonial charters and state constitutions going back to the Massachusetts Body of Liberties of 1641, in the Northwest Territory Ordinance of 1787, [22] and in the contemporaneous Judiciary Act of 1789. See id. at 970-71. Professor Foote explains the language of the Eighth Amendment excessive bail clause as a drafting error, the result of inadvertence by George Mason, the drafter of the Virginia Declaration of Rights and of the amendments proposed to Congress by the Virginia ratification convention in 1788. Id. at 984-87. Under this theory, Mason, who was not a lawyer, failed to appreciate the tripartite nature of the English protection against abusive pretrial detention, involving procedure and the right to bail as well as control of the judicial abuse of excessive bail, id. at 986, and used the limited language of the English Bill of Rights of 1689 to stand for the whole. The argument assumes, without foundation, that English law granted an absolute right to bail. [23] As we have seen, the definition of bailable offenses was left to Parliament, and the colonial charters and early constitutions varied in establishing a fundamental right to bail. In addition, even if the clause was lifted imperfectly from the English Bill of Rights of 1689, the clause was approved in Congress and ratified by the states in the form in which it stood and without indication of Mason's asserted intention to provide a right to bail. See Duker, supra note 10, at 84-85 n.303. Indeed, the contemporary understanding of the limited meaning of the excessive bail clause may be inferred from other states' proposals for the Bill of Rights and from the contemporaneous passage of an explicit federal statutory right to bail. See id. at 85-86; Meyer, supra note 10, at 1164, 1190-94. In addition to Mason's proposal from Virginia, seven other states made proposals for the Bill of Rights. The North Carolina and Pennsylvania proposals included only an excessive bail clause, although their constitutions each contained both an excessive bail clause and a right to bail provision. See Duker, supra note 10, at 83; Meyer, supra note 10, at 1192. Of the other five proposals, one (New York) included an excessive bail clause, but not one contained a right to bail provision. See Meyer, supra note 10, at 1193. In the same session in which Congress considered the proposals and finally approved a Bill of Rights, it also drafted and passed the Judiciary Act of 1789. The latter act established a statutory right to bail in noncapital cases. See note 6, supra. Although the Eighth Amendment and the statutory right to bail may have developed from two distinct sources, and there is nothing in the congressional record to suggest that the implications of the differing language were addressed, see Foote, supra note 9, at 971-73; Tribe, supra note 6, at 398, it must be presumed that Congress recognized the clear difference in scope of the clauses. The alternative explanation, that the clearly differing language was fortuitous, cannot be simply inferred without any evidence that Congress intended the differing language to carry the same meaning. Moreover, the right to bail in the 1789 Act would have been a redundancy if the excessive bail language meant the same thing even in capital cases.