Ex parte Merryman

Not to be confused with Ex parte Milligan.

Photograph of Roger B. Taney
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney issued the ruling in Ex parte Merryman.

Ex parte Merryman, 17 F. Cas. 144 (C.C.D. Md. 1861) (No. 9487), was a controversial U.S. federal court case that arose out of the American Civil War.[1] It was a test of the authority of the President to suspend "the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus" under the Constitution's Suspension Clause, when Congress was in recess and therefore unavailable to do so itself.[2] More generally, the case raised questions about the ability of the executive branch to decline to enforce judicial decisions when the executive believes them to be erroneous and harmful to its own legal powers.

John Merryman was a prominent planter from Baltimore County, Maryland, who had been arrested at his rural plantation for destroying railroad bridges on which Union troops were traveling. Held prisoner in Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor,[3] he was kept inaccessible to the judiciary and to civilian legal authorities generally. U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled in this case that the authority to suspend habeas corpus lay exclusively with Congress.[4] Taney's ruling was not a Supreme Court decision.

Taney filed his Merryman decision with the United States Circuit Court for the District of Maryland, but it is unclear if Taney's decision was a circuit court decision. One view, based in part on Taney's handwritten copy of his decision in Merryman, is that Taney heard the habeas action under special authority granted to federal judges by Section 14 of the Judiciary Act of 1789. According to this view, Merryman was an in-chambers opinion.[5] Due to its vague jurisdictional locus and hastened disposition, aspects of the Merryman decision remain contested to this day.[6][7]

The Executive Branch, including the United States Army, under the authority of the President of the United States as Commander-in-Chief, did not comply with Taney's Merryman opinion.

  1. ^ McGinty (2011) p. 173; Neely (2011) p. 65.
  2. ^ William H. Rehnquist, All the Laws But One (New York: Knopf, 1998), pp.27–39.
  3. ^ Fort McHenry had been nicknamed the "Baltimore Bastille" for its large numbers of Southern sympathizers under summary arrest held captive in the "Star Fort", while Congress was in recess that Spring of 1861.
  4. ^ Ex parte Merryman
  5. ^ "One significant point of disagreement among historians and political scientists is whether Roger Taney heard Ex parte Merryman as a U.S. circuit judge or as a Supreme Court justice in chambers." White, Jonathan W., Abraham Lincoln and Treason in the Civil War: The Trials of John Merryman, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011, pp. 38–39.
  6. ^ See Bruce A. Ragsdale, Ex parte Merryman and Debates on Civil Liberties During the Civil War, pages 11 & 15 (Federal Judicial History Office 2007). Federal Judicial Center
  7. ^ Seth Barrett Tillman, Ex parte Merryman: Myth, History, and Scholarship, 224 Military Law Review 481 (2016) (peer reviewed), SSRN 2646888