Opinion ID: 2368807
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: constitutional right to bail

Text: Appellant attacks the constitutionality of the pretrial detention statute on its face as contrary to an asserted constitutional right to bail. The source for this asserted right is the excessive bail clause of the Eighth Amendment. [4] Whether this clause grants a right to bail in a criminal case has never been decided in the federal courts. [5] Before the adoption of the pretrial detention statute, Congress had always provided a statutory right to pretrial bail for federal detainees in noncapital cases. [6] Appellant concedes that the literal language of the excessive bail clause does not encompass a right to bail, but would have us find such a right implied in the clause on the basis of the history of the adoption of the clause and its constitutional context. The history of the Eighth Amendment, however, is generally unilluminating and falls short of supporting, let alone compelling, the conclusion that a right to bail must be found by implication.
The excessive bail clause of the Eighth Amendment was adopted almost verbatim from section nine of the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776, [7] which in turn was derived from the English Bill of Rights of 1689. [8] The excessive bail clause of the English Bill of Rights itself sought to close a loophole in the English bail system by restricting the discretion of local justices in setting bail for offenses otherwise deemed bailable. The limited nature of the excessive bail clause in its original form becomes apparent upon an examination of the evolution of the English bail system. See Duker, The Right to Bail: A Historical Inquiry, 42 Alb.L.Rev. 33, 34-66 (1977); Foote, The Coming Constitutionality Crisis in Bail (pt. 1), 113 U.Pa.L.Rev. 959, 967-68, 982-83 (1965); Meyer, Constitutionality of Pretrial Detention (pt. 1), 60 Geo.L.J. 1139, 1151-56, 1180-90 (1972). [9] The English bail system developed out of the ancient Anglo-Saxon forms of sureties into early common law bail. By the thirteenth century the local representative of the Crown, the sheriff, exercised a broad and ill-defined discretionary power to bail the King's prisoners committed to his custody. This power was widely abused by sheriffs who extorted money from individuals entitled to release without charge and who accepted bribes from those who were not otherwise entitled to bail. The first statutory regulation of bail, the Statute of Westminster I, 3 Edw. 1, c. 15 (1275), sought to curb such abuses by carefully enumerating which offenses were bailable and which were not. The sheriffs, and later the justices of the peace, were required to grant or deny bail according to the terms of the statute, which also provided sanctions for noncompliance. The statute, however, did not bind the higher justices nor the King himself, and Parliament was free to redefine which crimes were bailable. See Duker, supra at 43-50; Meyer, supra at 1151-57. Further limitations on the discretion to grant bail were enacted to cure defects in the law which the Stuarts exploited to deny release to particular prisoners. The Petition of Right of 1628, in which King Charles I acquiesced, required that, upon petition, a return be made showing the specific cause upon which a prisoner was being detained. [10] A specific return, rather than a general recitation that the prisoner was detained at the King's command, would enable a justice to determine whether the cause was a bailable offense, as determined by statute or common law, as well as allow for an answer and a trial on the charge. Procedural abuses by the Stuarts after the Restoration led to the enactment fifty years later of the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, which closed the procedural loopholes by firmly establishing a means for enforcing the rights of bail and habeas corpus. [11] When, thereafter, the protections of the Habeas Corpus Act were circumvented by the practice of setting prohibitively high bail, the excessive bail clause was drafted into the Bill of Rights of 1689, clause 10, in order to correct this injustice. See Duker, supra note 10, at 66; Foote, supra note 9, at 967-68; Meyer, supra note 10, at 1189-90. In sum, the excessive bail clause was developed as a specific remedy for judicial abuse of the bail procedure as otherwise established by law, and did not, in and of itself, imply any right to bail.
Appellant contends that, notwithstanding the narrow language and limited purpose of the excessive bail clause in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the practice in the colonies established the right to bail as a fundamental right which perforce was implicitly guaranteed by the Eighth Amendment. This argument is not supported by history. First, a fundamental right to bail was not universal among the colonies or among the early states; several states made the right to bail a statutory rather than a constitutional right. See Duker, supra note 10, at 77-83; Meyer, supra note 10, at 1191. Second, the language of several state constitutions explicitly limiting the power of the judiciary to set excessive bail negates any suggestion that the excessive bail clause was intended to restrict the definition of bailable offenses by the legislature. See Duker, supra note 10, at 81-83. Third, the early state constitutions that specifically granted a right to bail also contained an excessive bail clause, suggesting a recognition of the distinction between the two. See Meyer, supra note 10, at 1191. The English common law and statutory provisions regulating bail procedures were simplified to some extent in various colonial charters. The earliest colonial provision concerning bail is found in section eighteen of the Massachusetts Body of Liberties of 1641. [12] This enactment deviated sharply from the English tradition by granting an affirmative, though limited, right to bail. Excluded were capital crimes, contempts of court, and other cases to be expressly designated by the legislature. The Massachusetts provision influenced article XI of the Pennsylvania Charter of Liberty (1682), [13] which granted a constitutional right to bail in a form that was later adopted by Pennsylvania and North Carolina in their constitutions in 1776, and was widely copied in 19th century state constitutions: That all persons shall be bailable by sufficient sureties, unless for capital offences, when the proof is evident, or presumption great. [14] Many other colonial charters, however, simply guaranteed that the subjects of the colony would enjoy the same liberties as Englishmen, [15] which, as we have seen, only encompassed a right to bail as defined by Parliament. When the colonies asserted their independence in 1776, they largely adopted the bail provisions from their colonial charters into their state constitutions. The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 included an excessive bail clause, but the right to bail itself was relegated to statutory status. This excessive bail clause makes clear that it was intended as a limitation on the judiciary and not the legislature: [16] No magistrate or court of law shall demand excessive bail or sureties .... [17] The New Hampshire Constitution of 1784 used identical language, [18] while the Maryland Constitution of 1776 stated [t]hat excessive bail ought not to be required ... by the courts of law. [19] This explicit language refutes appellant's contention that the early excessive bail clause, standing alone, was generally intended to embody a limitation on the legislature by granting a right to bail as well as a protection against judicial abuse. Finally, the state constitutions of North Carolina and Pennsylvania, which were the only state constitutions of those adopted before the Bill of Rights to include an express right to bail in noncapital cases, also contained a distinct excessive bail clause. [20] The inclusion of two separate provisions regulating the bail system suggests a recognition of their differing language and purposes.
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.
The Supreme Court has never ruled on whether the excessive bail clause imports a right to bail. The government cites the Court's language in Carlson v. Landon, 342 U.S. 524, 546, 72 S.Ct. 525, 537, 96 L.Ed. 547 (1952), that the very language of the Amendment fails to say all arrests are bailable. Carlson involved the denial of bail to alien Communists pending deportation proceedings. The Court concluded that the Eighth Amendment does not apply to such civil proceedings. Accordingly, the Carlson holding does not directly concern criminal cases, particularly as the Court emphasized Congress' broad powers to deal with aliens. Moreover, the Carlson dictum regarding the scope of an Eighth Amendment right to bail conflicts with the tenor of Stack v. Boyle, 342 U.S. 1, 72 S.Ct. 1, 96 L.Ed. 3 (1951), decided the same term. Stack v. Boyle , although concerned with the excessiveness of the bail orders under review there, recognized the traditional right to freedom before conviction [which] permits the unhampered preparation of a defense, and serves to prevent the infliction of punishment prior to conviction. Id. at 4, 72 S.Ct. at 3. [24] Lower courts have relied, alternatively, on the dicta of both Carlson and Stack to find or deny a constitutional right to bail, but without any convincing resolution. [25]
Apart from the asserted support in the history of the development and adoption of the excessive bail clause, appellant argues that the apparent anomaly of the excessive bail clause can only be explained by construing it to grant a right to bail. The core of this argument is that the excessive bail clause, insofar as it operates as a limit on congressional power, is a futility if Congress is prohibited from requiring excessively high bail but is free to deny bail altogether by making some or all crimes nonbailable. The only explanation for prohibiting excessively high bail but allowing the denial of all bail would be a concern for economic equality between the rich and the poor, which the historical evidence clearly negates. [26] To avoid rendering the excessive bail clause surplusage, the argument runs, it must be broadly interpreted to grant a right to bail. See Foote, supra note 9, at 987. This argument presumes, however, that the excessive bail clause was intended primarily to limit the legislative power of Congress rather than to limit the discretion of the judiciary in setting individual bail. The historical origins of the excessive bail clause, as well as its narrow language, indicate that its primary purpose is to limit the judiciary. The major reason advanced for construing the clause as directed to Congress (and thus as a broader limitation on its powers) is the constitutional context of the Bill of Rights itself. The Bill of Rights, it is argued, had as its central concern ... protection against abuse by Congress. Id. at 969, 988; Tribe, supra note 6, at 400. See also Ingraham v. Wright, 430 U.S. 651, 664-66, 97 S.Ct. 1401, 1408-10, 51 L.Ed.2d 711 (1977) (history of adoption of Eighth Amendment indicates that cruel and unusual punishment clause was intended to restrict Congress as well as the judiciary). A cursory examination of other provisions contained in the Bill of Rights, however, reveals that the conduct of the judicial branch was an important, if not the chief, concern. The indictment, double jeopardy, and due process clauses of the Fifth Amendment, and the Sixth Amendment's criminal trial rights, clearly were intended to curtail the powers of the courts as well as those of Congress in legislating for the courts. A second related argument is that while an unlimited legislative power to define the boundaries of the citizen's rights, such as the right to bail, is consistent with the English theory of civil liberties in which Parliament is the ultimate authority, it is generally inconsistent with a constitutional form of government like ours. Foote, supra note 9, at 969, 988; see Tribe, supra note 6, at 400. This reasoning requires, however, an antecedent finding that the right to bail is a fundamental right that the framers of the Bill of Rights meant to protect against congressional encroachment, because plainly not all asserted rights are constitutionally protected. While the history of the development of bail reveals that it is an important right, and bail in noncapital cases has traditionally been a federal statutory right, neither the historical evidence nor contemporary fundamental values implicit in the criminal justice system requires recognition of the right to bail as a basic human right, Foote, supra note 9, at 969, which must then be construed to be of constitutional dimensions.