Habeus Corpus - Research Paper Example

Due to this reason, the Great Writ, often referred to as the writ of Habeas Corpus, constitute an important means for the protection of prisoners from unlawful governmental action and imprisnoment. (Sharpe, 1976). To ensure that the executive departments of the government are accountable to the judiciary is, by far, the overriding purpose of habeas corpus. The Latin phrase habeas corpus ad subjiciendum, is the phrase from which the term habeas corpus has been derived. The phrase literally means to “have the body to submit to the authority of the court”.

The roots of the writ of habeas corpus can be traced to the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 enacted by the British Parliament. The writ of Habeas Corpus later on became a part of the Constitution of the United States of America. According to Article 1, Section 9, the Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended because it is essential for the protection of personal freedom except in the Cases of Rebellion. (Schultz, 2009). Keeping in view the fact that the US Constitution states about the suspension of writ of habeas corpus in Invasion of Public Safety cases, thus, in context to the war on terror, the prisoners cannot enjoy the privileges of writ of teh habeas corpus.

History The writ of habeas corpus originated in the Common Law and initially it was only viewed as a legal procedure through which the federal judiciary evaluated the legality of the authority of the federal government. In simple words, the habeas corpus was a legal proceeding through which the court determined the legitimacy of a prisoner’s detention. In such cases, the legality of the prisoner’s detention is justified by the government official in court by presenting legal documents such as a warrant or a judgment of conviction or documents which prove that the official was ordered to imprison the individual.

(Schultz, 2009). The availability of the Great Writ and the nature of the claims that can be considered have been significantly expanded over the past few decades. The Great Writ was extended to include the consideration of whether the state prisoner’s detention violated any rights protected by the US Constitution, was enacted by the US Congress under the title of Habeas Corpus Statute in 1867. Later, the types of the claims which could be asserted against the state officials as constitutional violations grew substantially following the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Later, by the 1970s, Habeas Corpus had evolved into a means intended to be utilized for the assertion of provisions of the national constitution in an effort to challenge the legality of the detention of a prisoner. The challenges included are challenges to incarceration following a criminal conviction, detention immediately following an arrest. Moreover, the commitment to a mental institution and challenges to the nature of the detention were also became a part of the habeas corpus in the late 1970s.

Most frequently, the habeas corpus is utilized by the state inmates to review their criminal convictions. The inclusion of allegations of constitutional violations occurring during trials paved way for the prisoners to request a comprehensive review of their state court criminal trials. Most importantly, through the writ of habeas corpus, the state inmates received a forum which could be utilized by the court to determine if the prisoners