This Day in Legal History: The Execution of Sir Thomas More
On July 6, 1535, Sir Thomas More was beheaded at Tower Hill in London, convicted of high treason against King Henry VIII. More had been one of the most powerful men in England—a lawyer, a scholar, a former Lord Chancellor, the King’s own friend—and he went to the scaffold because he would not say the words the King demanded.
The dispute was, at its heart, about supremacy. Henry VIII had broken with Rome and declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England, and Parliament had passed the Act of Supremacy and an Act of Succession requiring subjects to swear an oath acknowledging the King’s new status and the legitimacy of his marriage to Anne Boleyn. More refused to take the oath. Crucially, he did not denounce the King. He said nothing at all. He believed that by staying silent he stayed within the law—that under the old maxim, silence gives consent, and no court could convict a man for what he had not said.
The Crown answered that theory with new law. The Treason Act of 1534, which took effect in early 1535, made it treason to “maliciously” deprive the King or Queen of their “dignity, title, or name”—and the government argued that More’s conspicuous silence about the King’s supremacy was itself a denial of it. More was tried on July 1, 1535, before a panel that included Anne Boleyn’s father, brother, and uncle. The decisive testimony came from Richard Rich, the solicitor general, who claimed More had privately rejected the King’s title in conversation in the Tower. More insisted the testimony was perjured. The jury deliberated for about fifteen minutes and found him guilty. He was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered; the King, in what passed for mercy, commuted the sentence to beheading.
More’s case endures in the legal imagination because it sits at the fault line between law as an instrument of power and law as a limit on power. More was a formidable lawyer who tried to use the law’s own rules—the presumption that silence is not a crime, the requirement of proof—to protect his conscience, and the state simply rewrote the rules and manufactured the proof. His famous last words, that he died “the King’s good servant, but God’s first,” draw the line between obedience to the state and obedience to something the state cannot command. Four centuries later, we still cite More when we argue about compelled speech, about the right to remain silent, about loyalty oaths, and about what a person owes a government that has turned the machinery of law against him. He is a patron saint of lawyers precisely because he lost—because his trial shows how thin the protection of law can be when those in power decide they would rather have a conviction than a fair one.
A federal appeals court has ruled that Immigration and Customs Enforcement cannot detain migrants for more than ninety days without giving them a chance to seek release at a bond hearing. In a 2-1 decision, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals—one of the most conservative in the country—sided against the administration, a ruling that could affect thousands of people held in detention in states like Texas and Louisiana.
When the government seeks to deport someone, that process can take months or even years, and in the meantime the government often detains the person. The legal question is whether the government can simply hold someone indefinitely while the case grinds on, or whether at some point that person is entitled to a hearing where a neutral decision-maker asks whether they actually need to be locked up—whether they’re a flight risk or a danger, or whether they can safely be released on bond while they wait. The administration argued that certain migrants are subject to “mandatory detention” with no such hearing at all. The Fifth Circuit said that after ninety days, that position runs into constitutional trouble.
Imagine being held in a jail cell for months, not because a judge decided you were dangerous, but because a statute was read to mean nobody ever has to ask the question. The core idea the court is protecting is an old one: the government generally cannot deprive a person of physical liberty without some individualized process, some moment where a human being reviews your particular case. A bond hearing is that moment. It doesn’t guarantee release—it guarantees that someone with authority has to look at you and decide.
The Department of Homeland Security said it disagreed with the ruling and remained confident in its legal position on mandatory detention, which signals a likely appeal, possibly to the Supreme Court. But for now, the decision draws a line: prolonged civil detention without any bond hearing is constitutionally suspect, and the length of confinement matters. The ruling is significant not only for the thousands of detainees it directly affects, but because it comes from a court that rarely rules against this administration—a reminder that even sympathetic judges have limits when the question is indefinite detention without a hearing.
Appeals court bars mandatory detention for migrants past 90 days without bond hearing | Fox News
Court Blocks Immigration Detention Without Hearings
The Supreme Court has refused to hear Donald Trump’s appeal seeking to overturn the jury verdict finding him liable for abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll. With the Court declining to take the case, the 2023 verdict and the roughly five-million-dollar judgment against him stand.
In 2023, a civil jury found that Trump sexually abused Carroll in a New York department store in the mid-1990s and later defamed her by branding her account a lie. He was ordered to pay her about five million dollars. Trump appealed and lost in the lower courts, then asked the Supreme Court to step in. Last week the Court denied that request. When the Supreme Court denies review—what lawyers call denying “certiorari”—it isn’t endorsing the verdict or ruling on the merits. It’s simply declining to hear the case, which leaves the lower court’s decision in force. But the practical effect is the same as a loss: the judgment is final, and there are no more appeals to pursue.
It helps to separate two things people often blur together. This is a civil case, not a criminal one. Carroll didn’t send anyone to prison; she sued for money and for the harm to her reputation, and a jury of ordinary citizens weighed the evidence and believed her. The Supreme Court’s role at this stage isn’t to re-try the facts—juries find facts, and appellate courts generally don’t second-guess them. The question the Court was asked was narrower and more legal, and the Court decided it wasn’t worth their time to review.
The significance here is partly about accountability and partly about the ordinariness of the outcome. A private citizen brought a claim, a jury sided with her, the appellate courts affirmed, and the highest court in the country let that stand—the system working exactly as it’s supposed to, regardless of the defendant’s power. It’s also a marker of the limits of that power: the office does not come with a trapdoor out of a civil judgment. The verdict is now as final as verdicts get.
The Supreme Court’s next term, beginning in October, is already set to feature major cases involving gun rights, voting rules, LGBT rights, immigration detention, and corporate disputes. One of the highest-profile cases concerns whether states and local governments may ban assault-style rifles such as AR-15s, with challenges coming from Connecticut and Cook County, Illinois. Gun rights advocates argue that these weapons are commonly owned and protected by the Second Amendment, while government officials describe them as military-style firearms that pose serious public safety risks.
The Court will also hear a voting rights dispute over Arizona rules that would impose stricter proof-of-citizenship requirements for voter registration and allow removal of suspected noncitizens from voter rolls. A lower court blocked parts of that law after finding that they conflicted with federal voter registration protections. Another case involves whether certain immigrants with criminal convictions can be held for long periods during deportation proceedings without receiving bond hearings. The Trump administration is asking the Court to uphold that detention policy, while a lower court found that prolonged detention without a hearing can violate due process. The Court will also consider a religious rights case from Colorado involving Catholic groups that want an exemption from nondiscrimination rules tied to a state preschool funding program. That case adds to the Court’s ongoing disputes over how to balance religious liberty claims against LGBT anti-discrimination protections. The term will also include business-related cases involving ExxonMobil and Suncor, Apple and Epic Games, and PepsiCo.
US Supreme Court to hear gun, LGBT, voting rights cases in next term | Reuters
