Apparently, in the more oppressive times in old England, habeas-corpus suits were sometimes used to free people because they had been thrown in jail and then forgotten (presumably, along with the reasons why they had been thrown in jail in the first place). See 2 William Blackstone, bk. 3, ch. 7, at 138 (“[T]he oppression does not always arise from the ill nature, but sometimes from the mere inattention, of government. For it frequently happens in foreign countries (and has happened in England during temporary suspensions of the statute) that persons apprehended upon suspicion have suffered a long imprisonment, merely because they were forgotten.”).
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