MINNESOTA
Canonical Consultation
12/03/2014
Jennifer Haselberger
I suppose I should apologize in advance for returning to a subject that I have already discussed (namely, Thomas Reese’s post on the ‘firing’ of bishops and the need for due process of law in the Catholic Church), but this topic is one that has irked me for years. As someone who prosecuted penal cases in the years following the adoption of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People and the Essential Norms, I am used to hearing complaints about a lack of due process. Most of these complaints, in my experience, have been ill informed and without any basis in fact or law. The fact that a particular individual is unhappy with a verdict is not proof that his rights were violated.
I probably would have been more likely to let this topic go had I not been reading Robert Harris’s ‘An Officer and a Spy’ at the time that Father Reese’s article appeared. Harris’s novel is a fictionalization of the story of Georges Picquart, a colonel in the French Army who turned whistleblower over what has come to be known as ‘the Dreyfus Affair’. The trial, degradation, imprisonment, and eventual reinstatement of the Jewish Army Officer Alfred Dreyfus was one of the seminal events of the fin de siècle, and as someone who wrote her doctoral thesis on the evolution of law and legal procedure during this time, you can understand that this matter has always held my interest. However, I find Harris’s novel compelling for another reason. His description of Picquart’s moral dilemma when faced with overwhelming evidence of Dreyfus’s innocence as well as the refusal of the Army to revisit the case, and the consequences of Picquart’s decision to pursue justice regardless is so similar to what I experienced in the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis that sometimes I have found myself wondering if he was writing of my experience instead. I recommend Harris’s book, just as I recommend the Dreyfus case as an example of a true violation of due process and consequent miscarriage of justice. When one considers the fate of Dreyfus, wrongly imprisoned for four years and held in solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, one can truly grasp the importance of due process protections.
Due process is a concept in English common law that originated with the Magna Carta and spread throughout the British Empire. It prohibits the government (or King) from applying a punishment without the accused being informed of the accusation and of the evidence against him. This principle was enshrined in the US Constitution in the 5th and the 14th amendments. The Due Process Clause of the 5th amendment states that no person shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
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