SNIP A bill of attainder is an old way of saying that a person is "attainted", that he has "bad" or "corrupt blood", and that this has been determined by the fact of his having been convicted of crimes. In other words, he's categorized for official purposes as a "bad guy" for life.
Heh, heh, heh. Which could be rather short.
Just adding some info I came across some months ago to clear up archaic words and usage like Bill of Attainder and
corruption of blood.
In his book,
Origins of the Bill of Rights, Leonard Levy explains (paraphrase) that a Bill of Attainder is a legislative act whereby an individual is declared an outlaw. Also, anyone is legally entitled to kill him. The main problem with a Bill of Attainder is that the criminal conviction is done by the legislature just up and declaring the person such, rather than a jury after hearing the evidence in a trial.
You can see how a Bill of Attainder violates the right to a jury trial.
Corruption of blood refers to the heirs of the attainted person. In some cases in England, the attainder worked to deny the heirs the attainted person's titles (remember, titles were hereditary in England). In certain circumstances, his properties and estates could be seized, which is a way of dispossessing the victim's heirs of the property, the incomes from the estates, and a place to live. This last angle was a very powerful weapon psychologically. If you thought your wife and children would be left nearly destitute, you'd tend to be rather careful not to cross the king and parliament.
So, in current application, one can guess that although there are no actual Bills of Attainder anymore, there are ways the government could accomplish basically the same effect. For example, when ACORN was video-busted giving advice to the faux prostitute and pimp, there was agitation in the press to yank the government funding for ACORN. Or, put another way, for Congress to basically create a defacto Bill of Attainder against ACORN. I didn't happen to agree with that legal theory, but you can see the argument: for Congress to defund ACORN, Congress would in effect be declaring ACORN to have committed crimes, a function for a jury.
I highly recommend
Origins of the Bill of Rights. Its still available. Got mine at Barnes & Noble. Amazon has it, too. You learn a lot fast from this book. Easy to read, too.
If you can find a copy of his
Origins of the 5th Amendment, please let me know. He won a Pulitzer prize for it; but that was in 1968.
