Thread by @GrayConnolly

Noting Sal's disappointment: a Bill of Attainder is a legislative judgment of guilt. In the 17thC esp the Parliament could function as/usurp the role of a Court to judge persons for crimes & vote on their guilt (with or without a trial) & assign a punishment, including death.

https://twitter.com/cdrsalamander/status/1349738048800632833

To be clear: the major vice of a Bill of Attainder is that the legislature invades the realm of the Court .... also that the legislature may vote X as guilty of vague crimes otherwise not previously be known as to law & entirely on the basis of prejudice against X & not evidence.

Bills of Attainder often specified in the Bill that X was guilty of crime Y and must suffer death - we are most horrified by death as a punishment but historically it was very common, especially in political cases involving loyalties & success/corruption in governmental workings

Ironically, the impeachment power of the US Congress is a form of legislative judgment albeit there is meant to be a modicum of a trial even if it simply degenerates into partisan hackery by various poseurs cf the impeachment of Warren Hastings & the role of Edmund Burke.

The word "Attainder" comes from the same root as "taint" & means by the Bill's passage you were 'attainted' or corrupted by your treachery or other charged crimes. Your "taint" meant also you were 'civilly dead' & had no remedies in courts even if your punishment was commuted.

Also, a Bill of Attainder was a lot of work & so was mainly against someone worth penalising to the powers that be....So a Noble would be attainted, executed, and forfeit their titles and lands to the Crown or, more usually, it would pass to a relative who would be more "loyal"

So, for example, after the 1745 Jacobite rising failed (in which a distant relation was executed), of the Catholic Frasers (the Lords Lovat of Commandos fame), the Fraser Jacobite was himself executed but the Fraser family kept lands & Frasers fought for the King in Nth America

Will say if you are setting an exam in the common law world, you are mad not to have a good Attainder/pains and penalties problem somewhere.

One of many advantages of Roman Law was that crimes had been exhaustively prescribed & codified for years, with Sovereigns & their magistrates enforcing their prosecution, so there was just not the same need on the continent for Bills of Attainder as in the British Isles.

There is a species of such Bills called a "bills of pains and penalties" which usually does not involve sentencing someone to death but, realistically, if you were remanded to the Tower or to hard labour elsewhere, absent some special consideration, you would likely die there.

Arguably, Lord Stair (one of the great Scots lawyers but a terrible man) & the relevant Campbells would, in a just world, have suffered a Bill of Pains & Penalties, if not Bills of Attainder, after the Glencoe massacre of the martyred MacDonalds in 1692.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_…