User:Killianpstcc/sandbox

Trials
The government was determined to give the soldiers a fair trial so that there could be no grounds for retaliation from the British and so that moderates would not be alienated from the Patriot cause. Several lawyers refused to defend Preston due to their Loyalist leanings, so he sent a request to John Adams, pleading for him to work on the case. Adams was already a leading Patriot and was contemplating a run for public office, but he agreed to help in the interest of ensuring a fair trial.[59] He was joined by Josiah Quincy II after Quincy was assured that the Sons of Liberty would not oppose his appointment, and by Loyalist Robert Auchmuty.[60] They were assisted by Sampson Salter Blowers, whose chief duty was to investigate the jury pool, and by Paul Revere, who drew a detailed map of the bodies to be used in the trial.[61][62] Massachusetts Solicitor General Samuel Quincy and private attorney Robert Treat Paine were hired by the town of Boston to handle the prosecution.[63] Preston was tried separately in late October 1770. He was acquitted after the jury was convinced that he had not ordered the troops to fire.[64]

The trial of the eight soldiers opened on November 27, 1770.[65] Adams told the jury to look beyond the fact that the soldiers were British. He referred to the crowd that had provoked the soldiers as "a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes, and molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish Jack Tarrs" (sailors).[66] Adams used these derogatory and racist terms as a way to downplay the event. '''Implying that because some of the protesters were black, there lives had less value. One of the first men to be shot was indeed an african american. Therefore, it makes sense as to why Adams would use this racist tactic of racial prejudice. A tactic that would continue in court trials for generations. Adams then''' argued that the soldiers had the legal right to fight back against the mob and so were innocent. If they were provoked but not endangered, he argued, they were at most guilty of manslaughter.[67]

The jury agreed with Adams and acquitted six of the soldiers after 2½ hours of deliberation. Two of the soldiers were found guilty of manslaughter because there was overwhelming evidence that they had fired directly into the crowd. The jury's decisions suggest that they believed that the soldiers had felt threatened by the crowd but should have delayed firing.[68] The convicted soldiers were granted reduced sentences by pleading benefit of clergy, which reduced their punishment from a death sentence to branding of the thumb in open court.[69]

Quote 1: "There was enough evidence for and against the guilt of those soldiers to bring the case to equipoise. To make the math easy, Adams simply discounted the value of black life. This approach would become a habit for Adams and his generation, the authors of the Constitution's three-fifths clause and its other shameful equivocations on slavery. Another generation of Americans would be able to reconcile after the Civil War only when leaders in the North abandoned freemen to the mercy of the South, in tacit agreement that black rights and black lives were not worth continued national discord." (Peterson, Farah. Black Lives and the Boston Massacre. Maryland law review, 2018)

Quote 2: "An outgrowth of tensions stoked by the quartering of British troops in colonial Boston between 1768 and 1770, the "massacre" referred to the killing of five civilians in an encounter between soldiers and a local crowd. The first casualty, Crispus Attucks, identified in contemporary published reports as a "mulatto" from Framingham, was enshrined as a martyr, the first to die in an intensifying political struggle with Britain. The incident triggered a local outcry leading to the incarceration of the commanding officer and soldiers involved in the shooting, and the removal of the British regiments to a location outside the city." (Mcardle, Andrea. Race and the American originary moment: the Boston massacre narratives and the idea of citizenship. Rutgers Race and the Law Review, 2005)