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very room to get all the people who wanted
to talk and all the witnesses who wanted
to hear. This included the Maryland Coun-
cil of Churches, the Archdiocese of Balti-
more of the Roman Catholic Church,
Baltimore Jewish Council, Christian Life
Committee of the Baptist Convention of
Maryland, and various other groups. They
were all uniform in their agreement that
the First Amendment was an effective bar-
rier between church and state. We have
adopted it, after much debate and much
consideration in our Committee. Ladies and
gentlemen, it was adopted 16 to 1.
The next area is section 3, right to due
process and equal protection.
I am not going to cover that in full. It
is the 14th Amendment. We think that it
does what we believe it should do. It es-
tablishes that, "No person shall be deprived
of life, liberty, or property without due
process of law; nor be denied the equal
protection of the laws."
I might say to you, ladies and gentlemen,
by way of passing, that this 14th Amend-
ment was not adopted by the State of
Maryland at the time that the other states
did. It was not until 1959 when our own
Senator William James introduced a joint
Senate Resolution that it was finally passed.
It was approved by the Senate on April 2,
1959, and by the House on April 3 unani-
mously and signed by Governor Tawes on
April 28, 1959. So, it is here to stay.
This we conceive is an absolute prohibi-
tion against discrimination with respect to
the public areas. It is a timeless statement
that does the work that we want it to do.
I shall pass over very quickly, in view
of the time element, to search and seizure.
We have added in section 4 two points
that will be of interest to you. One is we
have provided for the protection against
unreasonable interceptions of communica-
tions, and for other unreasonable invasions
of privacy.
Now, these are areas that I suspect will
evoke questions which we are prepared to
answer. In this day and age of an increas-
ing probing into the areas of privacy and
the encroachment or the privacy of indi-
viduals by bureaucratic forms of govern-
ment, we felt that this was a very impor-
tant provision to place in our Bill of
Rights.
The right of privacy has always existed.
It is a right that we have. Nevertheless,
it is a right that we think should now be
specifically stated.
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Section 5 deals with the rights of the
accused, and I must just say that these
follow pretty closely the Sixth Amendment
of the Federal Constitution and our own
Article XXI.
We will find that in most of these areas
the Maryland Declaration of Rights will
cover these rights though they will not
cover them as clear-cut and succinctly as
we have stated them here. Now, in this
area I have only one comment to make that
is of importance. We considered very care-
fully whether there should be a continua-
tion of the unanimous verdict of juries in
criminal cases, and we decided without dis-
sent that there should be, and also that
there should be no diminution in the size
of the jury composed of twelve jurors.
Now, we have added a second section
that is new in the Constitution. It says
this:
"An accused, except in cases punishable
by death or life imprisonment, shall be en-
titled to release pending trial conditioned
only upon such bail or other terms as are
reasonably necessary to secure his appear-
ance before the Court."
This is the law as it is supposed to exist,
in theory, though not always in practice.
I will make only this comment about this.
We have submitted this to Mr. Charles
Moylan, Jr., the State's Attorney of Balti-
more City, and to Chief Judge Dulaney
Foster of Baltimore City and both of them
have found there is no difficulty with re-
spect to its terminology.
Finally, in section 6 we have the right
not to incriminate one's self, which is a
basic concept that has been in the Mary-
land Declaration of Rights and is in the
Fifth Amendment of the Federal Consti-
tution.
We have added a second freedom or per-
sonal liberty:
"No person shall be twice put in jeopardy
of criminal punishment for the same
offense."
This is in the federal Constitution and
has never been in the Maryland Constitu-
tion, but wo think it is a personal right
that should be clearly enunciated. There
have been cases involving double jeopardy,
but they have been based upon the basic
English common law.
In section 7, Jury Trials in Civil Cases,
we have made several changes. We have
left delegated to the legislature the respon-
sibility to determine the Jurisdictional
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