Habeas Corpus Countdown:
Past Quotes of the Day
“[T]he Great Writ of habeas corpus allows the Judicial Branch to play a necessary role in maintaining this delicate balance of governance, serving as an important judicial check on the Executive’s discretion in the realm of detentions.”
-Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor
Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507 (2004)
“The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious, and the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."
-Sir Winston Churchill
“The Military Commissions Act enacted last year was a stain on our nation's history. I agree with the President that we should bring terrorists to justice but we should do it in a way consistent with the basic values and principles of our constitutional system of government.”
-Senator Russell D. Feingold
(D-WI)
“Of the liberty of conscience in matters of religious faith, of speech and of the press; of the trial by jury of the vicinage in civil and criminal cases; of the benefit of the writ of habeas corpus; of the right to keep and bear arms.... If these rights are well defined, and secured against encroachment, it is impossible that government should ever degenerate into tyranny.”
-James Monroe
Fifth President of the United States
“The stripping of habeas was an historic and monumental misstep that continues to take us down a path that leads us away from our values and the image we have earned as a nation that promotes and lives by the rule of law.”
-Donald J. Guter, Rear Admiral, Judge Advocate General’s Corps, U. S. Navy (Ret.)
Dean, Duquesne University School of Law
“We must preserve our values. If we forsake them now, in the face of this enemy, they aren’t really values, and our attempts to promote them internationally will be viewed as cynical and self-serving. It is not a Rule of Law if we only apply it when it is convenient. We delude ourselves if we give up what we have cherished for generations in the face of adversity. That comes from fear and weakness.”
-John D. Hutson, RADM JAGC USN (ret)
Dean and President, Franklin Pierce Law Center
“Certainly, we stand together as a nation in our collective outrage over the September 11th terrorist attacks. However, we do nothing to win the battle against terrorism by sacrificing our precious freedoms and liberties.”
-Congressman John Conyers, Jr.
(D) Michigan. 14th
“The bill assumes that we need not have the normal protections that we have had since the Magna Carta for people to at least say habeas corpus; bring the body, sir King, before the magistrate to make sure you have the right guy, to make sure there is some basis for holding this person and depriving him of liberty.”
-Congressman Jerrold Nadler
(D) New York, 8th
“The writ of habeas corpus is actually the lynchpin of a free society. Take away this great writ and all other rights — such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, gun ownership, due process, trial by jury, and protection from unreasonable searches and seizures and cruel and unusual punishments — become meaningless.”
-Jacob Hornberger
Lawyer and Founder of the Future of Freedom Foundation
“The President cannot eliminate constitutional protections with the stroke of a pen by proclaiming a civilian, even a criminal civilian, an enemy combatant subject to indefinite military detention.”
-Judge Diana Gribbon Motz
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit
(Al-Marri v. Wright, No. 06-7427, 2007)
“I am confident, sadly confident, as I stand here, that decades from now people will look back and say: What were they thinking? America, this great, kind leader of a nation, treated people who were detained and imprisoned, interrogated people in the crudest way? I am afraid this is going to be one of the bitter legacies of the invasion of Iraq.”
-Senator Dick Durbin
D-IL
“This does not mean that we can allow terrorists to alter the fundamental openness of U.S. society or the government’s respect for civil liberties. If we do so, they will have won.”
-Senator Max Baucus
D-MT
“Duty-Honor-Country and Semper Fidelis are NOT just ‘bumper stickers.’ These words, and others like them, form the ethos of our Armed Forces. When you start to tamper with the laws governing warfare – laws recognized by countries around the world – you run risk of bringing into question the very ethos these men and women hold dear.”
-General Krulak, USMC (Retired)
31st Commandant of the Marine Corps
“The president, just like the soldiers, sailors, and marines under his command, [should] be required to comply with the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions. Because I believe that resorting to secret prisons, coercive interrogations, and the abandonment of the rule of law is not the way to keep our country safe from a handful of fanatics.”
-Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift (USN)
“Habeas protects against the executive taking a person and locking them up without a chance to prove their innocence. Habeas is what stands between us and a system of secret detentions, a police state.”
-Jonathan Hafetz
Director of Litigation at the Liberty and National Security Project of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law
“The president has now succeeded where no one has before. He’s managed to kill the writ of habeas corpus. The reality is without habeas corpus, a lot of other rights lose their meaning. But if you look at the actual Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments of that pesky Constitution, you’ll see just how many remain for your protection … No. 3 is still safe. We can rest easy knowing that we will never, ever have to quarter soldiers in our homes as long as the third amendment still stands strong.”
-Keith Olbermann
Host, MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann”
“This is the key protection that people have if they're held in violation of the law. If there's no habeas corpus, and if the government wants to pick you or me off the street and hold us indefinitely, how do we get our release?”
-Erwin Chemerinsky
Duke University Law Professor
“Freedom of religion, freedom of the press, trial by jury, habeas corpus, and a representative legislature... I consider as the essentials constituting free government, and...the organization of the executive is interesting as it may insure wisdom and integrity in the first place, but next as it may favor or endanger the preservation of these fundamentals.”
-Third President of the United States
Thomas Jefferson
“The idea of an innocent person taken into custody and beaten and imprisoned for months without access to an attorney or a court of law is abhorrent to most Americans. By denying detainees the right to seek habeas corpus relief, we abandon the principles that made our nation great.”
-Alliance for Justice President
Nan Aron