Criminal Injustice: Slaves and Free Blacks in Georgia's Criminal
Justice System is the most comprehensive study of the criminal
justice system of a slave state to date. McNair traces the
evolution of Georgia's legal culture by examining its use of slave
codes and slave patrols, as well as presenting data on crimes
prosecuted, trial procedures and practices, conviction rates, the
appellate process, and punishment. Based on more than four hundred
capital cases, McNair's study deploys both narrative and
quantitative analysis to get at both the theory and the reality of
the criminal procedure for slaves in the century leading up to the
Civil War. He shows how whites moved from the utopian innocence of
the colony's original Trustees, who envisioned a society free of
slavery and the depravity it inculcated in masters, to one where
slaveholders became the enforcers of laws and informal rules, the
severity of which was limited only by the increasing economic value
of their slaves as property. The slaves themselves, regarded under
the law both as moveable property and--for the purposes of
punishment--as moral agents, had, inevitably, a radically different
view of Georgia's slave criminal justice system. Although the rules
and procedures were largely the same for both races, the state
charged and convicted blacks more frequently and punished them more
severely than whites for the same crimes. Courts were also more
punitive in their judgment and punishment of black defendants when
their victims were white, a pattern of disparate treatment based on
race that persists to this day. Informal systems of control in
urban households and on rural plantations and farms complemented
the formal system and enhanced the power of slaveowners. Criminal
Injustice shows how the prerogatives of slavery and white racial
domination trumped any hope for legal justice for blacks.
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