What does &quot;corruption of blood&quot; mean? Having read this question, it makes reference to treason, to which part of it states: The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture except during the life of the person attainted. Unfortunately, the archaic language makes it difficult for me to understand. I presume attainder means detention, but I can't work out what "corruption of blood" or "forfeiture except during the life of the person attainted" means or why it's prohibited.
In English law during the late Medieval and early modern period (from 1321 to 1798), it was possible for Parliament to pass a "Bill Of Attainder". This declared a person guilty of a crime, often treason, by legislative act, without any trial or other legal process. See the Wikipedia article for more detail. Often a Bill of Attainder not only decreed that a person (or people) was guilty, but also confiscated the convicted person's property, preventing his (or rarely her) heirs from inheriting, and possibly rendering those heirs ineligible to hold public offices or peerages. The heir would also be prevented from inheriting through the attainted person. For example, property held by the father of the attainted person would not pass to the child of the attainted person. This was called "corruption of the blood", and was viewed with particular horror by many during the colonial period and before. It effectivly treated the heirs of the attainted person as illegitimate. Attainder was usually followed by execution, possibly by torture. The bill might specify the specific fate of the person attained. The US constitutional provision prohibits declaring people guilty of crimes by legislative act, and prohibits sentences for crimes that take property or rights from the family or heirs of the convicted person, even in cases of treason. At least that is how it has been interpreted. Fines may be levied, but may only fall on the actual property of the person convicted. The US Supreme Court has dealt with this clause in several cases: Ex parte Garland, 71 U.S. 333 (1866) (law requiring lawyers to swear that they had not supported the confederacy held unconstitutional); Cummings v. Missouri, 71 U.S. 277 (1867) (Law requiring an oath that the person had not supported the confederacy for a professional license held unconstitutional); Hawker v. New York, 170 U.S. 189 (1898) (a state law barring convicted felons from practicing medicine upheld); Dent v. West Virginia, 129 U.S. 114 (1889), (a state law newly requiring that practising physicians must have graduated from a licensed medical school upheld); United States v. Lovett, 328 U.S. 303 (1946) (federal law which declared three specific persons "subversive" and barred them from federal employment overturned); American Communications Association v. Douds, 339 U.S. 382 (1950) (federal law which required elected labour leaders to take an oath that they were not and had never been members of the Communist Party USA, and that they did not advocate violent overthrow of the U.S. government upheld); United States v. Brown, 381 U.S. 437 (1965) (law which made it a crime for a former communist to serve on a union's board overturned); and Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, 433 U.S. 425 (1977) (law seizing Nixon's presidential papers upheld).
The Fifth and Sixth Amendments are about civil and criminal court proceedings. They do not apply to a university's internal disciplinary procedures, which are the subject of the Dear Colleague letter. Note for example the text of the Fifth Amendment: ... or be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. A university's disciplinary procedures do not deprive anyone of their life, liberty, or property. Typically, they only decide whether to suspend or expel the person as a student at the university, or apply other academic punishments (failing grades, marks on transcript, etc). I don't think there needs to be any law "affirming" this. Rather, there is simply no law that requires universities to use Fifth / Sixth amendment standards in their internal disciplinary procedures.
It is the job of the judge to instruct the jury about the law. If Texas had pattern instructions I'd look up what the instruction is for this matter, but you don't, so I don't know what the judge would say. But it is the judge's sole prerogative to instruct the jury in the law. If the question is a "commitment question", then it is an improper question and should be disallowed, see Stendefer v. State. The question "Would you presume someone guilty if he or she refused a breath test on their refusal alone?" is such a commitment question, and is disallowed. Similarly, "If the evidence, in a hypothetical case, showed that a person was arrested and they had a crack pipe in their pocket, and they had a residue amount in it, and it could be measured, and it could be seen, is there anyone who could not convict a person, based on that" (Atkins v. State, 951 S.W.2d 787). An improper commitment question could be of the type "could you refrain...": Let us assume that you are considering in the penalty phase of any capital murder case, okay? And some of the evidence that has come in shows that the victim's family was greatly impacted and terribly grieved and greatly harmed by the facts․Can you assure us that the knowledge of those facts would not prevent you or substantially impair you in considering a life sentence in such a case (Penry v. State, 903 S.W.2d 715). One way in which a commitment question can be legal is if it asks basically "can you uphold the law?", for example "can you consider probation in a murder case?", or "are you willing to consider mitigating circumstances". The wrong answer to those questions will lead to a for-cause dismissal. The third question is flagrantly improper, the first is rather improper, and the second probably is. If the question can be framed in terms of a candidate's willingness to follow the law, then it should be legal.
Is this realistic? Yes. The dramatic performance plays out in the same way that it would in the U.S. Court system. The actual killing of the wife would be 'legal', so can he be charged for murder for something that has been done legally, only because they can prove is intent to kill her before that? Especially since he has already been acquitted of that fact. Mostly, this is an issue of causation and not double jeopardy. From a double jeopardy perspective, the crime of murder is not complete until the person dies, and they have not be tried for murder, so this is a different crime that had not occurred until after the attempted murder trial was over. Causation Issues Even if the immediate cause of the wife's death is withdrawal of life support, the shooting could still be a legally sufficient cause of the wife's death. For example, suppose that you shoot someone and the hospital can't give the victim a blood transfusion because the victim has blood type O- (universal donor) which can only receive blood from other people with blood type O-, and the hospital, due to negligence on the part of a hospital administrator, has run out out of type O- blood. The fact that the victim would not have died if the hospital has not negligently failed to have type O- blood on hand does not provide a defense to murder on the part of the person who shot her. While terminating life support is "legal" it also constitutes a non-judicial finding with legal effect on the part of the person authorizing it and the physicians signing off on the decision, the further medical care would have been futile and that the person whose life support was terminated was already dead in key material respects, even though they would not be dead for purposes of a murder charge until life support is terminated. When death is a natural and foreseeable result of action that causes physical harm, the death is caused by the act that causes the physical harm. Something else that causes death would have to be a "superseding cause" and not just an additional cause of death. Thus, the fact that life support was terminated legally does not mean that she cannot be a murder victim. Indeed, many murder victims are people who are on life support for some period of time and then have that life support terminated because it is futile to continue medical care and the person is already "brain dead" or something equivalent to that. Collateral Estoppel Issues Double jeopardy does carry with it a related concept of "collateral estoppel" which provides that facts necessarily decided in one criminal case cannot be decided differently in a subsequent, related criminal case in some circumstances. But, collateral estoppel applies only when the facts in the prior criminal case were necessarily decided on the merits in the prior criminal case. Acquittal of criminal charged does not necessarily include a determination that someone was innocent of the charges. The fact that he was acquitted of attempted murder does not mean that the jury found that he didn't attempt or intend to murder her. In particular, a dismissal of criminal charges as a result of a technicality that excluded evidence related to an element of the crime for which there was an acquittal, is not a determination on the merits that a particular element of a crime was actually absent, so it would not be binding in the subsequent criminal case for murder. An acquittal does not mean that every element of the prior criminal charges was found not to be present. Collateral estoppel arising from the double jeopardy right, in contrast, might be a ground for dismissal of the murder case, if the man's primary (and perhaps only) defense to the attempted murder case had been that he had established the affirmative defense that someone else committed the murder, or that he had an alibi that made it impossible for him to have committed the murder. Then, the jury would have found on the merits that this defense, equally applicable to the murder case, had already been established.
Generally speaking the &quot;blessings of liberty&quot; phrase from the preamble to the US Constitution is not relied on for anything. It does not grant additional power to Congress or the Federal government as a whole, neither does it restrict the Federal government beyond the restrictions already included in the body of the Constitution. Congress often accepts hearsay when it takes testimony before a committee. Such testimony need not comply with the rules of evidence that apply in court. I am not clear what you mean by &quot;to pretext privacy and the right to try&quot;, please clarify this. I am not aware of any &quot;right to try&quot; under the Federal or State governments. The word &quot;pretext&quot; is not usually used as a verb in this way. Edit The link on &quot;right to try&quot; goes to a Quora question about laws passed by Congress later being held to be unconstitutional. That does happen. but I have never herd it called &quot;the right to try&quot;. The link on &quot;pretext&quot; goes to a security.se question about a &quot;convict internet&quot;. I don't see what that has to to with the preamble to the Constitution. 2nd Edit The &quot;blessings of liberty&quot; phrase from the preamble has nothing to do with laws against discrimination, neither authorizing nor restricting such laws.
There is no constitutional provision which grants the President such power. I am not aware of any provision of federal law which grants such power, nor of any case where a real president has exercised such a power. Of course, the President is a citizen, and any citizen may make a Citizen's arrest Particularly for a felony. (See also this FindLaw page on the subject.) And of course, as the head of the executive department, the President could order someone who clearly has powers of arrest to make an arrest, although such an order would not be valid in the absence of legal cause to make an arrest. A comment called atention to 10 USC §252 which provides: Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion. The history for this section dates from 1861. A note indicates that a prior version was the basis of Executive order 10730, sending federal forces into Little Rock, AK in 1957 to enforce school integration there. However, this section does not explicitly increase the arrest powers of anyone, and does not grant the President personally any power of arrest.
Yes. In 1872 President Grant was stopped for speeding (on horseback, mind you). The officer, observing that he had stopped the President of the United States, initially let him go with nothing but a verbal warning. Later the same day, the same officer stopped Grant again speeding in the same place. The officer then informed Grant that he would have to be taken in, to which Grant gave a reply encouraging the officer to do his duty. Grant was then taken to the police station where he was charged with speeding, and held until he paid a $20 fine, at which point he was released. In summary, POTUS was: Charged with an offence Deprived of his liberty for committing said offence Held until he served his punishment (paying $20) ... all without impeachment. Now, this was a long time ago. I think that today, this is unlikely, since Secret Service would (legal or not) shield the President from arrests (national security reasons). However if a state level authority did manage to arrest the President for a crime and refused to let him go, then the Vice President and cabinet would invoke the 25th Amendment (on the grounds that the President is unable to discharge his duties due to imprisonment), so that the imprisoned person would now be a former president.
I would argue the Constitutional basis of these actions would be the Constitution itself, namely Article II, Section 4: The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors. and Article I, Section 3, Clause 7: Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law. Note also, that as Hamilton explained in the Federalist Papers, the Impeachment process was a check brought over from England (it predated the formation of Britain by several centuries) as a check on Executive (read Monarchal) power of royal appointments, including Judges. So, to answer your questions directly: Serving out one's term or resigning is not a shield to impeachment, otherwise one could simply play &quot;whack-a-mole&quot;, appointing the same individual repeatedly (which is also why future barring of the individual from governmental office is an option). The purpose of impeachment is, per Hamilton, to react to &quot;political crimes&quot;; &quot;mundane&quot; crimes are to be handle by the normal judicial system. Nixon did famously resign rather than be impeached, but he was barred from running again anyway, having served two terms as President. Congress at that time chose not to continue the impeachment process after his resignation (note that disqualification is an option, but not required, punishment that can be levied by Congress in the event of impeachment). See Article I, Section 3, Clause 7, quoted above.