When an English or U. S. citizen is jailed, his lawyer gets a piece of paper from a judge and shows it to the police who are then bound to yield their prisoner for a hearing before a magistrate on the charges and evidence' against the prisoner, or straightway release him. Long before the Magna Charta (1215) Anglo-Saxons wrested from king and barons the freeman's right to that piece of paper. It was, and is, called a writ of habeas corpus ("you may have the body"). It is issued on the theory that a man is innocent until...
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