898 JOINT RESOLUTIONS.
Report of the
Committee. |
is this: has the Legislature the constitutional
authority to ratify this proscription as a part of
the Constitution of the United States?
The Legislature of Maryland is vested with all
general power of legislation appropriate to free
Republican Government.
Bat it is limited by the express or implied pro-
hibitions of the Constitution of the State.
The seventeenth article of the Declaration of
Rights declares "that retrospective laws punish-
ing acts committed before the existence of such
laws, and by them only declared criminal are
oppressive, unjust and incompatible with liberty ;
wherefore, no ex post facto law ought to be made."
And the Constitution of the United States declares
that "no bill of attainder or ex post facto law shall
be passed." And. "no State shall pass any bill
attainder, or ex post facto law." Thus it is
beyond question that neither Congress nor any
State can give legal effect to this proposition.
The people of each State, separately, and the
people of all the States unitedly have, in the most
solemn form, denied such power to both their
Federal and State Governments,
The reasons for this denial of such power were
fully set forth by the Judges of the Supreme
Court of the United States in seventeen hundred
and ninety-eight in the case of Calder and wife
versus Bull and wife, 3 Dallas, 386.
Justice Chase said, "the obligation, of a law in
governments established on express compacts and
on republican principles, must be determined by the
nature of the powers upon which it is founded. The
Legislature may enjoin, permit, forbid, and pun-
ish; they may declare new crimes, and establish
rules of conduct for all its citizens in future'
cases."
The prohibition against their making any ex-
post facto laws was introduced for greater caution,
and very probably arose from their knowledge that
the Parliament of Great Britain claimed and ex-
ercised a power to pass such laws under the de-
nomination of bills of attainder, declaring acts to
be treason, which were not treason when commit- |
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