The Murder of Habeas Corpus & Arlen Specter’s about-face.

A freely available legal opinion

By JEFFREY TOOBIN

Issue of 2006-12-04
Posted 2006-11-27

(TNY) - President Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in Maryland on April 27, 1861, two weeks after
the Confederate attack on the Union garrison at Fort Sumter. “Lincoln could look out his window at the White House and see Robert E. Lee’s plantation in Virginia,” Akhil Reed Amar, a professor at Yale Law School and the author of “America’s Constitution,” said. “He was also facing a rebellion of so-called Peace Democrats in Maryland, meaning there was a real chance that Washington would be surrounded and a real threat that the White House would be captured.” On Lincoln’s order, federal troops arrested Baltimore’s mayor and chief of police, as well as several members of the Maryland legislature, who were jailed so that they couldn’t vote to secede from the Union.

(Click & Read on courtsey of The New Yorker)

Photo Captions & Credits: "A trial statement details the charges against Thomas Nailor during a May 17, 1835, riot on Capitol Hill." The statement is signed by U.S. Attorney Francis Scott Key. (Records of District Courts of the United States, RG 21)