United States
In pre-independence America, bail law was based on English law. Some of the colonies simply guaranteed their subjects the protections of that law. In 1776, after the Declaration of Independence, those that had not already done so enacted their own versions of bail law.
Section 9 of Virginia's 1776 Constitution states "excessive bail ought not to be required..." In 1785, the following was added, "Those shall be let to bail who are apprehended for any crime not punishable in life or limb...But if a crime be punishable by life or limb, or if it be manslaughter and there be good cause to believe the party guilty thereof, he shall not be admitted to bail." Section 29 of the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 states that "Excessive bail shall not be exacted for bailable offences: And all fines shall be moderate."
The prohibition against excessive bail in the Eighth Amendment is derived from the Virginia Constitution, on which Samuel Livermore commented, "The clause seems to have no meaning to it, I do not think it necessary. What is meant by the term excessive bail...?" The Supreme Court has never decided whether the constitutional prohibition on excessive bail applies to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, like the English Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, requires that a suspect must "be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation" and thus enabling a suspect to demand bail if accused of a bailable offense.
Read more about this topic: Bail
Famous quotes related to united states:
“The United States Constitution has proved itself the most marvelously elastic compilation of rules of government ever written.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“Steal away and stay away.
Don’t join too many gangs. Join few if any.
Join the United States and join the family
But not much in between unless a college.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Today’s difference between Russia and the United States is that in Russia everybody takes everybody else for a spy, and in the United States everybody takes everybody else for a criminal.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“It is a curious thing to be a woman in the Caribbean after you have been a woman in these United States.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)