Protections Against Arbitrary Imprisonment

In the What Happened to Jerry? storyline that Etcetera is working on, people in New City are disappearing and it seems the government has something to do with it. That’s not too unusual, even for a “free” country such as the United States, as our research uncovered in The History of Disappearing and Internment.

What protects people from those in power grabbing and imprisoning whoever they feel like, whenever they feel like? Through much of human history, kings and landlords could do just that, especially to anyone beneath their social class. It wasn’t until the decline of the Hero Value System (Hierarchical-Feudal) and the beginning of the Citizen Value System (Republican-Industrial) in The Rise of Reason (1300s-1800s) that this problem was confronted by The Rule of Law.

Let’s do some research into the some specific aspects of The Rule of Law as it applies to arbitrary imprisonment. For each of the concepts below, please develop a definition in your own words and give a brief history of how the idea came to be and evolved over time.

• Rule of Law
• Habeas Corpus
• Due Process
• 1354 Magna Carta (Edward III), Clause 39
• Due Process protections of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution

I’m thinking this research will likely end up as something Mycroft reveals during the course of trying to find Jerry. It’s also a great thing to learn since its the right of every citizen in the free world — but one that is constantly in danger of erosion by the state power.

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Feature Image: Gerald Praschl The fence and guard tower at the Soviet forced labor camp Perm-36 100 km northeast of the city of Perm in Russia, part of the prison camp system operated by the Soviet Union in the Stalin era known as the GULag. The last remaining example of a GULag labor camp, the site has been preserved as a museum and is open to the public as “The Museum of the History of Political Repression Perm-36” https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_fence_at_the_old_GULag_in_Perm-36.JPG. CC-by-SA 3.0.