A Ticket for Manslaughter

In the case of State V. Mann, the supreme court examined whether or not it was legal for Mr. Mann of North Carolina to shoot his run away slave Lydia. Clearly a hot topic for Mr. Mann as he was fined a whopping $10 and he felt that this was unjust so flexing his rights he took this case to the courts of North Carolina.

The state of North Carolina was defending their ruling today in the courts that Mr. Mann should be fined the $10 for a number of reasons. They argued from a moral, biblical and lawful stance. The most powerful points were obviously argued from the lawful stance mainly being that the slave Lydia was in fact not Mr. Mann's property but she was actually being rented at the time to Mr. Mann. This meant that Mr. Mann was not free to treat Lydia as if she was his property because she simply was not. However the defense weakened their argument significantly when they argued from the Biblical stance because they mentioned that Mr. Mann should be put to death for simply owning a slave. This was hypocritical from the defense because they argued that killing the slave Lydia was morally wrong but somehow killing Mr. Mann would be morally right.

The prosecutor Mr. Mann and his team of lawyers had a strong argument as to why this fine was unjust. Firstly they argued that Lydia was simply breaking the law by leaving the plantation in the first place. This would mean that Mr. Mann was simply trying to uphold the law and did what was in his legal rights to do so. The main contradiction made by the prosecution was that Mr. Mann was in fact the rightful owner at the moment of the crime in question because the slave was rented to Mr. Mann and he had payed for the slave. The most powerful argument the prosecution had was that the state of North Carolina was in fact defending a guilty slave because she was first to break the law and did deserve to be disciplined.

With the evidence and arguments presented today I would side with and support the prosecution because while Mr. Mann did have an over reaction about how the slave was to be disciplined, he was acting in that way because the slave had originally broken the law by trying to leave the plantation.