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Monday, April 10, 2006
Ind. Courts - Judge Sharp to speak at Civil War Round Table
The Bremen Enquirer reports, in a story by Lyn Ward that begins:
BREMEN - On Tuesday, April 11, the Civil War Round Table will hear from U.S. District Court Judge Allen Sharp who researched a 135-year-old case and how it relates to modern day.“Since this decision affects our freedoms even now, it is a very important legal event,” said Civil War buff Lowell Roberts who has been with the Round Table for eight years.
“An Echo of the War: The Aftermath of the Ex parte Milligan Case” published in 2003 is only one of Sharp's historical writings.
Lambdin P. Milligan was a lawyer, farmer and railroad entrepreneur from Huntington, Ind. who openly took the side of the South with regard to slavery and the Civil War.
“Milligan made a speech in Fort Wayne to perhaps as many as a thousand people, advocating willful and, if necessary, violent resistance to the draft. Milligan was soon arrested in Huntington, taken on a special train to Indianapolis, and tried before a military commission of 12 Union army officers,” summarized Sharp. Milligan was subsequently found guilty in late 1864 and sentenced to death.
The question became do military commissions hare authority over civilians?
In 1866, the United States Supreme Court said no. Milligan was released from prison and returned home to a hero's welcome. The Court ruled that Indiana was not a war zone and civilian citizens could not be tried before a military commission.
Subsequently, Milligan filed his own lawsuit seeking damages naming as defendants all of those who were involved in his experience before the military commission. The late Chief Justice William Rehnquist labeled it the first great civil-rights case.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on April 10, 2006 11:21 AM
Posted to Indiana Courts