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A bill of attainder (also known as an act of attainder or writ of attainder) is an act of a legislature declaring a person or group of persons guilty of some crime and punishing them without benefit of a judicial trial.
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The word “attainder”, meaning "taintedness", is part of English common law. Under English law, a criminal condemned for a serious crime, whether treason or felony (but not misdemeanour, which referred to less serious crimes), could be declared "attainted", meaning that his civil rights were nullified: he could no longer own property or pass property to his family by will or testament. His property could consequently revert to the Crown or to the mesne lord. Any peerage titles would also revert to the Crown. The convicted person would normally be punished by judicial execution as well—when a person committed a capital crime and was put to death for it, the property left behind escheated to the Crown or lord rather than being inherited by family. Attainder functioned more or less as the revocation of the feudal chain of privilege and all rights and properties thus granted.
Due to mandatory sentencing, the due process of the courts provided limited flexibility to deal with the various circumstances of offenders. The property of criminals caught alive and put to death because of a guilty plea or jury conviction on a not guilty plea could be forfeited, as could the property of those who escaped justice and were outlawed; but the property of offenders who died before trial, except those killed during the commission of crimes (who fell foul of the law relating to felo de se), could not be forfeited, nor could the property of offenders who refused to plead and who were tortured to death through peine forte et dure.
On the other hand, when a legal conviction did take place, confiscation and corruption of blood sometimes appeared unduly harsh for the surviving family. In some cases (at least regarding the peerage) the Crown would eventually re-grant the convicted peer's lands and titles to his heir. It was also possible, as political fortunes turned, for a bill of attainder to be reversed. This might even happen long after the convicted person was dead.
Unlike the mandatory sentences of the courts, acts of Parliament provided considerable latitude in suiting the punishment to the particular conditions of the offender's family. Parliament could also impose non-capital punishments without involving courts; such bills are called "bills of pains and penalties".
Bills of attainder were sometimes criticized as a convenient way for the King to convict subjects of crimes and confiscate their property without the bother of a trial—and without the need for a conviction or indeed any evidence at all.
The first use of attainder was in 1321 against both Hugh le Despenser, 1st Earl of Winchester and his son Hugh Despenser the Younger, Earl of Gloucester (they were both attained, not for opposing the King, but for supporting the King) and the last in 1798 against Lord Edward FitzGerald for leading the Irish Rebellion of 1798.
In England, those executed after the passing of attainders include George Plantagenet, 1st Duke of Clarence (1478), Thomas Cromwell (1540), Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury (1540), Catherine Howard (1542), Thomas Seymour, 1st Baron Seymour of Sudeley (1549), Thomas Howard (1572), Thomas Wentworth (1641), Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud (1645), and the Duke of Monmouth. In the case of Catherine Howard, in 1541 King Henry VIII was the first monarch to delegate Royal Assent, to avoid having to assent personally to the execution of his wife.
After defeating Richard III and replacing him on the throne of England, Henry VII had Parliament pass a Bill of Attainder against his predecessor. It is noteworthy that this bill made no mention whatsoever of the Princes in the Tower.
Although deceased by the time of the Restoration, the regicides John Bradshaw, Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton and Thomas Pride were served with a Bill of Attainder on 15 May 1660 backdated to 1 January 1649 (NS). After the committee stages the Bill of Attainder passed both the Houses of Lords and Commons and was engrossed on 4 December 1660. This was followed with a resolution:
That the Carcases of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, John Bradshaw, and Thomas Pride, whether buried in Westminster Abbey, or elsewhere, be, with all Expedition, taken up, and drawn upon a Hurdle to Tiburne, and there hanged up in their Coffins for some time; and after that buried under the said Gallows: And that James Norfolke Esquire, Serjeant at Arms attending the House of Commons, do take care that this Order be put in effectual Execution.
This also passed both Houses on the same day.[1][2][3]
In 1688, the English King James II (James VII of Scotland), driven off by the ascent of William and Mary in the Glorious Revolution, came to Ireland intent on reclaiming his throne. After his arrival, the Parliament of Ireland assembled a list of names in 1689 of those reported to have been disloyal to him, eventually tallying between two and three thousand in a bill of attainder. Those on the list were to report to Dublin for sentencing. One man, Lord Mountjoy, was in the Bastille at the time and was told by the Irish Parliament that he must break out of his cell and make it back to Ireland for his punishment, or face the grisly process of being drawn and quartered.[4] The parliament became known in the 1800s as the "Patriot Parliament".
Later defenders of the Patriot Parliament pointed out that the ensuing "Williamite Settlement forfeitures" of the 1690s named an even larger number of Jacobite suspects, most of whom had been attainted by 1699.[5]
In the Westminster system (and especially in the United Kingdom), a similar concept is covered by the term private bill (which upon passage become private acts). Note however that 'private bill' is a general term referring to a proposal for legislation applying to a specific person; it is only a bill of attainder if it punishes them. Previously, private bills were used in some Commonwealth countries to effect divorce.[6] Other traditional uses of private bills include chartering corporations, changing the charters of existing corporations, granting monopolies, approving of public infrastructure and seizure of property for those, as well as enclosure of commons and similar redistributions of property. Those types of private bills operate to take away private property and rights from certain individuals, but are usually not called "bill of pains and penalties". The last United Kingdom bill called a "Pains and Penalties Bill" was Pains and Penalties Bill 1820 and was passed by the House of Lords in 1820, but not considered by the House of Commons; it sought to divorce Queen Caroline from King George IV and adjust her titles and property accordingly, on grounds of her alleged adultery, as many private bills dealing with divorces of private persons did.
Previously secret British War Cabinet papers released on 1 January 2006 have shown that, as early as December 1942, the War Cabinet had discussed their policy for the punishment of the leading Nazis if captured. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had then advocated a policy of summary execution with the use of an Act of Attainder to circumvent legal obstacles. He was dissuaded from this by cabinet minister Richard Law who pointed out that the United States and Soviet Union still favoured trials.[7]
In two cases of attempts to pass laws inflicting a judicial penalty on a specific person (in the first case Clifford Olson, in the second case Karla Homolka), the speakers of the House and Senate, respectively, have ruled that Canadian parliamentary practice does not permit bills of attainder or bills of pains and penalties.[8][9]
Although the Commonwealth Constitution establishes the principle of separation of powers for the Commonwealth, it is not extended to states. Therefore, states remain free to structure their constitutions to permit bills of attainder.
In various states, acts have been passed during the 1990s to allow the continued detention of dangerous criminals after their term which applied to specific individuals such as Gregory Wayne Kable in NSW or Garry David in Victoria. These acts are similar to bills of attainder, but do not declare a person guilty of a crime; they merely permit extended detention. More recently, Australian parliaments have preferred the practice of applying preventative and indefinite detention to any criminal who meets specific conditions, rather than to named criminals.[10]
Bills of attainder were used through the 18th century in England, and were applied to British colonies as well. One of the motivations for the American Revolution was anger at the injustice of attainder—though the Americans themselves used bills of attainder to confiscate the property of British loyalists (called Tories) during the revolution. American dissatisfaction with attainder laws motivated their prohibition in the Constitution (see the case of Parker Wickham).
The United States Constitution forbids legislative bills of attainder under Article I, Section 9. It was considered an excess or abuse by the British monarchy and Parliament. No bills of attainder have been passed since 1798 in the UK.[citation needed] Attainder as such was also a legal consequence of convictions in courts of law, but this ceased to be a part of punishment in 1870.[11] The provision forbidding state law bills of attainder, Article I, Section 10, reflects the importance that the framers attached to this issue.
Within the U.S. Constitution, the clauses forbidding attainder laws serve two purposes. First, they reinforced the separation of powers, by forbidding the legislature to perform judicial or executive functions—since the outcome of any such acts of legislature would of necessity take the form of a bill of attainder. Second, they embody the concept of due process, which was partially reinforced by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. The text of the Constitution, Article I, Section 9; Clause 3 is "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed". The constitution of every State also expressly forbids bills of attainder. For example, Wisconsin's constitution Article I, Section 12 reads:
Contrast this with the subtly more modern variation of the Texas version: Article 1 (Titled Bill of Rights) Section 16, entitled Bills of Attainder; Ex Post Facto or Retroactive Laws: Impairing Obligation of Contracts: "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, retroactive law, or any law impairing the obligation of contracts, shall be made".
Two of the Supreme Court's first decisions on the meaning of the bill of attainder clause came after the American Civil War. In Ex parte Garland, 71 U.S. 333 (1866), the court struck down a federal law requiring attorneys practicing in federal court to swear that they had not supported the rebellion. In Cummings v. Missouri, 71 U.S. 277 (1867), the Missouri constitution required anyone seeking a professional's license from the state to swear they had not supported the rebellion. The Supreme Court overturned the law and the constitutional provision, arguing that the people already admitted to practice were subject to penalty without judicial trial.[12] The lack of judicial trial was the critical affront to the Constitution, the Court said.[13]
Just two decades later, however, the Court upheld similar laws. In Hawker v. New York, 170 U.S. 189 (1898) a state law barred convicted felons from practicing medicine. In Dent v. West Virginia, 129 U.S. 114 (1889) a state law imposed a new requirement that practicing physicians had to have graduated from a licensed medical school or they would be forced to surrender their license. The Court upheld both laws because, it said, the laws were narrowly tailored to focus on an individual's qualifications to practice medicine.[14] That was not true in Garland or Cummings.[14][15]
The Court changed its "bill of attainder test" in 1946. In United States v. Lovett, 328 U.S. 303 (1946), the Court confronted a federal law which named three people as subversive and excluded them from federal employment. Previously, the Court had held that lack of judicial trial and the narrow way in which the law rationally achieved its goals were the only tests. But the Lovett Court said that a bill of attainder 1) Specifically identified the people to be punished; 2) Imposed punishment; and 3) Did so without benefit of judicial trial.[16] All three new prongs of the bill of attainder test were met in Lovett, and the court held that a congressional statute which bars particular individuals from government employment qualifies as punishment prohibited by the bill of attainder clause.
The Court shifted its position again just a few years later. The Taft–Hartley Act (enacted in 1947) sought to ban political strikes by Communist-dominated labor unions by requiring all elected labor leaders to take an oath that they were not and have never been members of the Communist Party USA, and that they did not advocate violent overthrow of the U.S. government. It also made it a crime for members of the Communist Party to serve on executive boards of labor unions. In American Communications Association v. Douds, 339 U.S. 382 (1950), the Supreme Court had said that the oath was not a bill of attainder because: 1) Anyone could avoid punishment by disavowing the Communist Party, and 2) It focused on a future act (overthrow of the government) and not a past one.[17] The Court went to great length in Douds to approve of the specific focus on Communists by noting what a threat communism was.[18] Now the Court had added an "escape clause" test to determining whether a law was a bill of attainder.[17] But just a year later, in United States v. Brown, 381 U.S. 437 (1965), the Court invalidated the section of the statute that made it a crime to serve on a union's executive board. Clearly, the Act had focused on past behavior and had specified a specific class of people to be punished. But if this specific focus in Brown was constitutionally invalid, why was it not constitutionally invalid in Douds?[19] (Many legal scholars assumed that Douds was effectively, if not officially, overruled.)[20] Additionally, the Court did not apply the punishment prong of its test, leaving legal scholars confused as to whether the Court still wished it to apply.[21]
The Supreme Court returned to emphasizing the narrowness and rationality of bills of attainder in Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, 433 U.S. 425 (1977). In 1974, Congress passed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, which required the General Services Administration to confiscate former President Richard Nixon's presidential papers to prevent their destruction, screen out those which contained national security and other issues which might prevent their publication, and release the remainder of the papers to the public as fast as possible.[22] The Supreme Court upheld the law in Nixon, arguing that specificity alone did not invalidate the act because President constituted a "class of one."[23] Thus, specificity was constitutional if it was rationally related to the class identified.[23] The Court modified its punishment test, concluding that only those laws which historically offended the bill of attainder clause were invalid.[24] The Court also found it significant that Nixon was compensated for the loss of his papers, which alleviated the punishment.[25] The Court further modified the punishment prong by holding that punishment could survive scrutiny if it was rationally related to other, nonpunitive goals.[25] Finally, the Court concluded that the legislation must be intended to punish; legislation enacted for otherwise legitimate purposes could be saved so long as punishment was a side-effect rather than the main purpose of the law.[26]
As of 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court has invalidated laws under the Attainder Clause on only five occasions.[27] However, several recent cases (which have not reached the Supreme Court) have raised the bill of attainder issue. In 1990, in the wake of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Congress enacted the Oil Pollution Act to consolidate various oil spill and oil pollution statutes into a single unified law, and to provide for a statutory regime for handling oil spill cleanup. This law has been challenged as a bill of attainder by the shipping division of ExxonMobil.[28] In 2003, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit struck down the Elizabeth Morgan Act as a bill of attainder.[29] There is argument over whether the Palm Sunday Compromise in the Terri Schiavo case was also a bill of attainder.[30] Some analysts consider the ultimately unsuccessful bill Congress proposed to confiscate 90 percent of the bonus money paid to executives at federally-rescued investment bank American International Group a bill of attainder, although disagreement exists on the issue.[31] In another recent case, the community organizing group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) sued the U.S. government after the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution in early 2009 barring the group from receiving federal funding.[32] Another, broader bill, the Defund ACORN Act, was enacted by Congress later that year. In March 2010, a federal district court declared the funding ban an unconstitutional bill of attainder.[33] On August 13, 2010, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed and remanded on the grounds that only 10 percent of ACORN's funding was federal and that did not constitute "punishment."[34]
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