Runaway Jury Quotes

Life is short..Live to the fullest..

She was pondering the option of law school, the great American baby-sitter for directionless postgrads.

Every jury has a leader, and that’s where you find your verdict.

She looked great in tight jeans and short skirts, she looked great in anything or nothing, really, but for the moment she wanted no one to notice her.

By five-thirty, eleven people had been excused, and sixteen others had been sent back to their seats after failing to sound sufficiently pitiful

Federal law enforcement officials, even in free states, were required to arrest fugitive slaves and anyone who assisted them and threatened with punishment if they failed to enforce the measure: “Any marshal or deputy marshal refuse to receive such warrant, or other process, when tendered, or to use all proper means diligently to execute the same, he shall, on conviction thereof, be fined in the sum of one thousand dollars.”41 The act nullified state laws and forced citizens and local officials to apprehend escaped slaves regardless of their convictions, religious views, or state or local laws and compelled citizens in free states to “aid and assist in the prompt and efficient execution of this law, whenever their services may be required.”42 Penalties were harsh and the financial incentives for compliance attractive. “Anyone caught providing food and shelter to an escaped slave, assuming northern whites could discern who was a runaway, would be subject to a fine of one thousand dollars and six months in prison. The law also suspended habeas corpus and the right to trial by jury for captured blacks.

Harkin asked for a no-strike guarantee in the future, but Easter wouldn’t commit.

Forget the taxpayers. I’m sure these lawyers here wouldn’t mind passing the plate. Look, ask each side to put up a thousand dollars. We can charter a huge boat and have a wonderful time.

Oden would not have had his ear business if it had not been for the death of a slave in Amherst County. A white man had cut off the ear of his “habitual runaway,” and the slave had bled to death. No one could understand what had happened—people had been cutting off ears or parts of ears for more than two centuries. In the seventeenth century throughout the Virginia colony even white indentured servants had had their ears cut off. But somehow the luck of the Amherst County man had run out and his $515 slave had died from the loss of blood. A few white people wanted him indicted for manslaughter, but the grand jury declined, finding that the man had suffered enough with the loss of his property.