Our God given rights are heavily protected by the many laws and acts throughout the government, but do we understand why or what could happen if they were not defended so diligently? Bills of attainder were used in monarchies to get rid of rebel leaders, remove corrupt officials, and keep order throughout kingdoms, but is the removing of a person’s rights a fair thing to do? Also, it would be simple to abuse this power for one person’s gain. Likewise, ex post facto, meaning “from a thing done afterward,” laws were used correctly, but were also abused in the worst ways. Bills of attainder and ex post facto laws violate the Constitution by preventing due process of law, depriving people of their rights, and allowing a person to be tried for the …show more content…
An ex post facto law is a law that penalizes crimes that happened before the law was made, which means the person committing the crime had no way to know the action was actually a crime (“Heritage Guide,” 2017). This violates the Fifth Amendment, which does not allow double jeopardy, or the trial of a person twice for the same crime. For example, if a person is accused of murder and acquitted he or she cannot be prosecuted for the exact same murder, but if there is a law made later, that is ex post facto, the person might be tried for the exact same murder again and be found guilty (“Bill of Rights,” 2017). The states established ex post facto laws before they were prohibited, so that they could punish certain people for crimes that previously were not illegal (“Heritage Guide,” 2017). The total prohibition of these laws was caused by the abuse of such laws by past governments and even some states had abused ex post facto laws and bills of attainder, so the government decided to prevent them from ever being issued again. These laws put people through great distress, which caused the government to totally ban them even though the laws could possibly be useful in the future. Some ex post facto laws did not infringe on the rights mentioned on the Constitution because, depending on the case, it is possible for an ex post facto law to be fair (Crosskey, 1947). The ex post facto clause in the Constitution has been interpreted to only involve criminal cases, so civil cases involving ex post facto laws, arguably, do not count and are Constitutional (Aiken, 1992). However, even if ex post facto laws are occasionally permitted, they put citizens at the mercy of the government because the government could create a law making previously legal action illegal, arrest people for these false crimes, and wrongly punish them for something that was not illegal