Page:Trials of the Slave Traders Samo, Peters and Tufft (1813).pdf/12

 It will appear to you by the evidence which I shall produce, that the prisoner at the bar has held those laws and their authority in contempt, and has violated them in defiance of warning and knowledge. You should, therefore, as good subjects and conscientious men, be careful to suffer no undue partiality, no warmth of friendship, if any you formerly possessed for the accused, to give the impulse of feeling a predominance over your better judgments, which can end only in betraying you from the strict line of your duty and your patriotism. The penalties of the act under which the prisoner at the bar now stands accused are, it is solemnly true, long, severe, and ignominious; so it was necessary and just they should be; but if the prisoner hath incurred them, it will be your imperative duty, as faithful jurors, to visit them upon him, by a verdict of Guilty, notwithstanding you may sympathize with him as fellow-men; but that would be a false compassion, which saves one at the probable sacrifice of thousands. That the cause of Samuel Samo now arraigned is one of great novelty and intricacy must be confessed. It is novel, because it is the first ever tried under the Slave Felony Act; it is intricate, because cunning art and contrivance have been employed to screen the violators of the law from the piercing eye of offended justice. The novelty will cease by the success of that vigilance which is now exerting to bring to light and legal investigation the concealed instruments of the slave trade; and the intricacy of the present case, I believe, I shall be able to unravel to the satisfaction of your Lordship, and the conviction of the Jury.

The evidence now to be produced will discover a system, by which the men who carry on the slave trade hope to obtain the profits of a base and barbarous traffic, and yet escape the just punishment which they ought to suffer for their crimes; and it will also shew that Samuel Samo, as