The Anderson case took place in Canada West from 1860 to 1861. The case dealt with whether or not to extradite an escaped slave to the United States on the charge of murder. The majority of the presiding judges who handled the case agreed that there was sufficient evidence to prove criminality of the extraditable offence. The decision was based upon the terms laid out in Article X of the Webster–Ashburton Treaty of 1842. Anderson was released on a technicality.
Jack Burrows, an enslaved man in Missouri, escaped from slavery in September 1853. [1] [2] On 28 September, three days after he left his enslavers, he encountered Seneca T. P. Digges, a slaveowner who sent his slaves to recapture Burrows. [3] [1] During a struggle, Burrows stabbed Digges, who died on 11 October. [1] [4] Accounts differ on whether Digges provoked Burrows. [5]
Burrows, tracked by bounty hunters, [6] travelled by foot to Chicago. From there, he went to Detroit and entered Canada, [1] reaching Windsor (then in Canada West) in November 1853. [7] While in Canada, Burrows changed his name to John Anderson. [8] Anderson lived and worked in Canada West from 1854 to April 1860, managing to keep a low profile. [8]
A slave catcher from Detroit named James H. Gunning investigated Anderson's case and eventually got a warrant around April or May 1860. [1] Anderson was arrested in August and held by Magistrate William Matthews in Brantford. [8]
Article X of the Webster–Ashburton Treaty allowed extradition from British North America to the United States if the act for which the US sought extradition would constitute a crime in the relevant British jurisdiction (in this case, Canada West). The central issue in Anderson's extradition case was whether his stabbing of Digges was a crime or simply an incident of his escape from slavery. [9]
Some have argued that the Anderson case, aside from igniting a media, legal, and political frenzy, had a profound impact on Canada’s future relationship with Britain. [10] [11] [12] It also set an important precedent for Canadian leaders to make the superior courts handle the most political divisive decisions, which had originally been reserved for the executive branch of government. [13]
Anti-slavery associations from Britain and pre-Confederation Canada played an instrumental role in assisting Anderson before, during, and after the case. John A. Macdonald used public funds to foot the bill for Anderson's legal defences. [14]
A notable event occurred while Anderson was awaiting an appeal of the Canadian court's initial decision, which stipulated that he should indeed be extradited. The English Court of Queen's Bench attempted to interfere by sending a writ of habeas corpus for him to appear before a court in London, England. To Britain's Canadian subjects, who were already in the process of handling the situation, "Not only was the writ 'an evil precedent', but it could lead to further conflict between English and Canadian judicatures." [15] The English courts never got their chance to handle the case because Anderson's appeal was expedited to the Court of Common Pleas. He was released because of faulty wording in the warrant.
The issue with the British writ and the negative reaction to it uncovered the need for written clarification of the relationship between British and Canadian courts. As one result, the Habeas Corpus Act 1862 was passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom in 1862, which denied British courts the right to issue writs of habeas corpus for British colonies or dominions with their own courts capable of doing so. It reaffirmed that Canadian jurisdictions had become self-sufficient and did not take kindly to interference in their judicial system. [16]
Habeas corpus is a recourse in law by which a report can be made to a court in the events of unlawful detention or imprisonment, requesting that the court orders the person's custodian, to bring the prisoner to court, to determine whether their detention is lawful.
Charles Pinckney was an American Founding Father, planter, and politician who was a signer of the United States Constitution. He was elected and served as the 37th governor of South Carolina, later serving two more non-consecutive terms. He also served as a U.S. Senator and a member of the House of Representatives. He was first cousin once removed of fellow signer Charles Cotesworth Pinckney.
The Fugitive Slave Act or Fugitive Slave Law was a law passed by the 31st United States Congress on September 18, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850 between Southern interests in slavery and Northern Free-Soilers.
A number of cases were tried before the Supreme Court of the United States during the period of the American Civil War. These cases focused on wartime civil liberties, and the ability of the various branches of the government to alter them. The following cases were among the most significant.
Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 41 U.S. 539 (1842), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the court held that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 precluded a Pennsylvania state law that prohibited blacks from being taken out of the free state of Pennsylvania into slavery. The Court overturned the conviction of slavecatcher Edward Prigg as a result.
Passmore Williamson was an American abolitionist and businessman in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a free state in the antebellum years. As secretary of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society and a member of its Vigilance Committee, Williamson is best known for helping Jane Johnson and her two sons gain freedom from slavery on July 18, 1855.
In the United States, extradition law is a collection of federal laws that regulate extradition, the formal process by which a fugitive found in the United States is surrendered to another country or state for trial, punishment, or rehabilitation.
Slavery at common law in the British Empire developed slowly over centuries, and was characterised by inconsistent decisions and varying rationales for the treatment of slavery, the slave trade, and the rights of slaves and slave owners. Unlike in its colonies, within the home islands of Britain, until 1807, except for statutes facilitating and taxing the international slave trade, there was virtually no legislative intervention in relation to slaves as property, and accordingly the common law had something of a "free hand" to develop, untrammelled by the "paralysing hand of the Parliamentary draftsmen". Two attempts to pass a slave code via Parliament itself both failed, one in the 1660s and the other in 1674.
In United States law, habeas corpus is a recourse challenging the reasons or conditions of a person's confinement under color of law. A petition for habeas corpus is filed with a court that has jurisdiction over the custodian, and if granted, a writ is issued directing the custodian to bring the confined person before the court for examination into those reasons or conditions. The Suspension Clause of the United States Constitution specifically included the English common law procedure in Article One, Section 9, clause 2, which demands that "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it."
In United States law, habeas corpus is a recourse challenging the reasons or conditions of a person's detention under color of law. The Guantanamo Bay detention camp is a United States military prison located within Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. A persistent standard of indefinite detention without trial and incidents of torture led the operations of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp to be challenged internationally as an affront to international human rights, and challenged domestically as a violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments of the United States Constitution, including the right of petition for habeas corpus. On 19 February 2002, Guantanamo detainees petitioned in federal court for a writ of habeas corpus to review the legality of their detention.
The Fugitive Slave Clause in the United States Constitution, also known as either the Slave Clause or the Fugitives From Labor Clause, is Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3, which requires a "Person held to Service or Labour" who flees to another state to be returned to his or her master in the state from which that person escaped. The enactment of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which abolished slavery except as a punishment for criminal acts, has made the clause mostly irrelevant.
Roger Brooke Taney was an American lawyer and politician who served as the fifth chief justice of the United States, holding that office from 1836 until his death in 1864. Taney infamously delivered the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), ruling that African Americans could not be considered U.S. citizens and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the U.S. territories. Prior to joining the U.S. Supreme Court, Taney served as the U.S. attorney general and U.S. secretary of the treasury under President Andrew Jackson. He was the first Catholic to serve on the Supreme Court.
The Habeas Corpus Act 1862 is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that limited the right of the English courts to issue writs of habeas corpus in British colonies or dominions. The act was passed in response to Ex parte Anderson, a case in the Canadian courts in which the English Court of King's Bench attempted to issue a writ of habeas corpus and have Anderson appear before an English judge. While the court issued the writ, it felt that setting such a precedent would interfere with the "higher degree of Colonial independence". As a result, the act was passed, receiving royal assent on 16 May 1862.
Lemmon v. New York, or Lemmon v. The People (1860), popularly known as the Lemmon Slave Case, was a freedom suit initiated in 1852 by a petition for a writ of habeas corpus. The petition was granted by the Superior Court in New York City, a decision upheld by the New York Court of Appeals, New York's highest court, in 1860 on the eve of the Civil War.
The Taney Court heard thirty criminal law cases, approximately one per year. Notable cases include Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), United States v. Rogers (1846), Ableman v. Booth (1858), Ex parte Vallandigham (1861), and United States v. Jackalow (1862).
The Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) is an American nonprofit animal rights organization seeking to change the legal status of at least some nonhuman animals from that of property to that of persons, with a goal of securing rights to bodily liberty and bodily integrity. The organization works largely through state-by-state litigation in what it determines to be the most appropriate common law jurisdictions and bases its arguments on existing scientific evidence concerning self-awareness and autonomy in nonhuman animals. Its sustained strategic litigation campaign has been developed primarily by a team of attorneys, legal experts, and volunteer law students who have conducted extensive research into relevant legal precedents. The NhRP filed its first lawsuits in December 2013 on behalf of four chimpanzees held in captivity in New York State. In late 2014, NhRP President Steven Wise and Executive Director Natalie Prosin announced in the Global Journal of Animal Law that the Nonhuman Rights Project was expanding its work into other countries, beginning in Switzerland, Argentina, England, Spain, Portugal, and Australia.
James Tilton was the first Surveyor General of the Washington Territory, from August 1, 1854 to July 17, 1861. He was also a soldier and a politician.
The Enterprise was a United States merchant vessel active in the coastwise slave trade in the early 19th century along the Atlantic Coast. Bad weather forced it into Hamilton, Bermuda waters on February 11, 1835 while it carried 78 slaves in addition to other cargo. It became the centre of a minor international incident when the British authorities freed nearly all the slaves. Britain had abolished slavery in its Caribbean colonies effective 1834. At that time it advised "foreign nations that any slavers found in Bermuda [and the Bahamas] waters would be subject to arrest and seizure. Their cargoes were liable to forfeiture" without compensation.
Commonwealth v. Aves, 35 Mass. 193 (1836), was a case in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on the subject of transportation of slaves to free states. In August 1836, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw ruled that slaves brought to Massachusetts "for any temporary purpose of business or pleasure" were entitled to freedom. The case was the most important legal victory for abolitionists in the 1830s and set a major precedent throughout the North.
Polly Strong was an enslaved woman in the Northwest Territory, in present-day Indiana. She was born after the Northwest Ordinance prohibited slavery. Slavery was prohibited by the Constitution of Indiana in 1816. Two years later, Strong's mother Jenny and attorney Moses Tabbs asked for a writ of habeas corpus for Polly and her brother James in 1818. Judge Thomas H. Blake produced indentures, Polly for 12 more years and James for four more years of servitude. The case was dismissed in 1819.