Opinion ID: 2219129
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: Sufficient Sureties in the Iowa Constitution(s).

Text: The bail system had been in operation for centuries before the first settlers of the Iowa territory arrived from Illinois in the early 1830s. [4] See James Alton James, Constitution and Admission of Iowa Into the Union, Stud. in Hist. & Pol. Sci., July 1900, at 9. In the interim between settlement and admission as a state, the territory operated under four constitutive documents: the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the Organic Law of Michigan, the Organic Law of Wisconsin, and, finally, the Organic Law of Iowa. Each of these documents applied to the settler population of Iowa, although the Northwest Ordinance provided the baseline statement of law from which each organic law made territory-specific deviations. None of these documents included a sufficient sureties clause, although article 2 of the Northwest Ordinance contemplated a right to bail, providing, in part: All persons shall be bailable, unless for capital offenses, where the proof shall be evident or the presumption great. Northwest Ordinance, ch. 8, 1 Stat. 50 (1789). The sufficient sureties clause eventually entered our constitutional lexicon when the delegates to our state's first constitutional convention met to draft our first constitution in October 1844. Unfortunately, no comment is recorded in relation to the clause in the scant records remaining from the convention. See Fragments of the Debates of the Iowa Constitutional Conventions of 1844 and 1846 (Benjamin F. Shambaugh ed., 1900) [hereinafter 1844/46 Debates]. The committee charged with drafting a bill of rights delivered a draft in which the clause was present, and the clause remained in the constitution eventually presented to the people for ratification. See id. at 24-25, 34-43, 162. Moreover, through thirteen years of turmoil over ratification and two subsequent revisions of our constitution, the clause remained unchanged and, from all indications, uncommented upon. [5] See id.; The Debates of the Constitutional Convention 97-226 (1857) [hereinafter 1857 Debates] (providing a transcript of the debate over revisions to the Bill of Rights of the 1844/46 constitution).