The South Carolina General Assembly next passed a law designed to make it even harder for unjustly imprisoned Black sailors to get a hearing in court by denying them access to the writ of habeas corpus. Across the slave states, free Black people hoping to demonstrate that they were being illegally imprisoned frequently used habeas corpus to force an investigation into the reasons for their incarceration. Access to this process was widely considered a common-law privilege to which all people were entitled. South Carolina now rejected common-law tradition by denying even this basic right to
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