Opinion ID: 2761478
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Origins and History of Bail in England

Text: {22} The right to pretrial release set forth in the New Mexico Constitution has roots that extend back to medieval England, where bail originated “as a device to free untried prisoners.” Daniel J. Freed & Patricia M. Wald, Bail in the United States: 1964 1 (1964); see IV William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England in Four Books 1690 (Rees Welsh & Co. 1902) (1769) (“By the ancient common law, before and since the [Norman] conquest, all felonies were bailable, till murder was excepted by statute; so that persons might be admitted to bail before conviction almost in every case.” (footnotes omitted)). See generally William F. Duker, The Right to Bail: A Historical Inquiry, 42 Alb. L. Rev. 33, 3466 (1977) (describing the origins and history of bail in England); Elsa de Haas, Antiquities of Bail 128 (1940) (concluding that the “root idea of the modern right to bail” came from “tribal custom on the continent of Europe”). {23} During the Anglo-Saxon period in England before the Norman conquest, the penalty for most crimes was a monetary fine paid as compensation to the victim. See June Carbone, Seeing Through the Emperor’s New Clothes: Rediscovery of Basic Principles in the Administration of Bail, 34 Syracuse L. Rev. 517, 519-20 (1983). Under this system of justice, the sheriff often required the accused to secure a third party, or surety, to guarantee the appearance of the accused for trial and the payment of the fine upon conviction. See id. at 520; see also Bail: An Ancient Practice Reexamined, 70 Yale L.J. 966, 966 (1961). The amount of money pledged as bail was identical to the penalty prospect upon a conviction, and the surety was required to pay the fine if the accused failed to appear for trial. Carbone, supra, at 520. This system of bail ensured victim compensation and deterred pretrial flight because the surety bore financial responsibility for payment of the penalty and had an incentive to produce the accused for trial. Id. {24} Following the Norman conquest of 1066, capital and corporal punishment began 8 gradually to replace monetary fines as the penalty for most offenses, and accused persons faced longer delays between accusation and trial as they waited for traveling judges to arrive and dispense local justice. See id. at 519, 521; see also Freed & Wald, supra, at 1 (“Disease- ridden jails and delayed trials by traveling justices necessitated an alternative to holding accused persons in pretrial custody.”). The development of corporal and capital punishment complicated the use of bail because the amount of money pledged no longer correlated directly to the potential punishment. Carbone, supra, at 522. The endowment of local sheriffs with discretion in setting bail led to rampant corruption and abuse. See United States v. Edwards, 430 A.2d 1321, 1326 (D.C. Cir. 1981) (en banc) (explaining that sheriffs “exercised a broad and ill-defined discretionary power to bail” prisoners and that 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”). {25} In response to historical abuses, the common law right to bail was codified into written English law. In 1215, the principles that an accused is presumed innocent and entitled to personal liberty pending trial were incorporated into the Magna Carta, which proclaimed that “no freeman shall be taken or imprisoned . . . [except by] the judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez, 372 U.S. 144, 186 (1963) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). In 1275, the English Parliament enacted the Statute of Westminster, which defined bailable offenses and provided criteria for determining whether a particular person should be released, including the strength of the evidence against the accused and the accused’s criminal history. See Bail: An Ancient Practice Reexamined, supra, at 966; Carbone, supra, at 523-26. In 1679, Parliament adopted the Habeas Corpus Act to ensure that an accused could obtain a timely bail hearing; and in 1689, Parliament enacted an English Bill of Rights that prohibited excessive bail. See Carbone, supra, at 528. In crossing the Atlantic, American colonists carried concepts embedded in these documents that became the foundation for our current system of bail. See id. at 529.