Ex parte Merryman

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Merryman, ex parte,

case decided in 1861 by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney sitting as a federal circuit judge in Baltimore. John Merryman, a citizen of Maryland, was imprisoned by the U.S. army on suspicion of favoring the Confederacy. He obtained a writ of habeas corpushabeas corpus
[Lat.,=you should have the body], writ directed by a judge to some person who is detaining another, commanding him to bring the body of the person in his custody at a specified time to a specified place for a specified purpose.
..... Click the link for more information. . The commanding general refused to respect this action, alleging that President Lincoln had authorized him to suspend the writ. Taney held that Article 1, Section 9, of the U.S. Constitution gave to Congress alone the power to suspend the writ in case of rebellion or invasion and that consequently the President's action had been without warrant and represented a threat to the liberties of all Americans. Lincoln, however, continued to adhere to the same practice throughout the Civil War. Congress ratified the suspension in 1863.

Bibliography

See H. S. Commager, ed., Documents of American History (8th ed. 1968).

References in periodicals archive ?

Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, 85 years old when President Lincoln issued the warrant for his arrest and dead before the end of the war, wrote in Ex Parte Merryman: "If the President of the United States may suspend the writ [of habeas corpus], then the Constitution of the United States has conferred upon him more regal and absolute power over the liberty of the citizen than the people of England have thought it safe to entrust to the crown--a power which the Queen of England cannot exercise to this day, and which could not have been lawfully exercised by the sovereign even in the reign of Charles the First."

Abraham Lincoln, stepfather of our country: despite many contrary opinions on the presidency and legacy of president Abraham Lincoln, one thing is certain: he left a lasting impact on the United States

Neely reads the case of Ex parte Merryman as a vital conflict in which "the political future of the United States was at stake" (48).

Lincoln's Legacy: Ethics and Politics

If they deal with legal issues at all, most Lincoln biographies and general histories of the Civil War era focus on the president's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and the resulting litigation in Ex parte Merryman, Ex parte Vallandigham, and Ex parte Milligan.

Lincoln and the Court

Chief Justice Roger Taney concluded in the case of Ex parte Merryman that, because the Suspension Clause is in Article I, it must have been understood as a power of Congress rather than the president--a reasonable interpretation, though hardly indisputable.

The president needs to invoke the constitution's wartime provisions: "how do we get from the decisive actions of [Andrew] Jackson, [Abraham] Lincoln, and [Franklin] Roosevelt to the Obama administration's stunning mishandling of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab?"

Ragsdale, Ex Parte Merryman and Debates of Civil Liberties During the Civil War (Federal Judicial Center 2007).

Lincoln the "dictator"

(145) Taney eventually came down with a decision in Ex parte Merryman, (146) in which he delivered a stinging rebuke to the president, declaring Lincoln's act in suspending the writ unconstitutional.

This consideration is limited to the facts surrounding Ex parte Merryman, 17 F.

Examining presidential power through the rubric of equity

In Ex parte Merryman, Chief Justice Taney, sitting as a circuit court judge, argued that President Lincoln had violated the language of the Suspension Clause.

You should have the body: understanding habeas corpus

His actions brought him into personal and professional conflict with Supreme Court Chief Justice Taney, who declared Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus illegal in Ex Parte Merryman, a decision Lincoln essentially ignored.

Lincoln's Constitution

Moreover, the ruling of the Supreme Court in Ex parte Merryman appears to make the military order unconstitutional for resident aliens who are deemed by the President to be subject to the order.

President Bush's military order establishing military tribunals to try noncitizens; is it beyond his constitutional and statutory authority?

33) When the dispatched marshal was refused entrance at the fort, Taney wrote his famous opinion in Ex parte Merryman.(10) (p.

All the Laws but One: Civil Liberties in Wartime

The author covers Abraham Lincoln's actions during the American Civil War and the landmark cases Ex parte Merryman (1861) and Ex parte Milligan (1866).