Such reasonable suspicion of guilt as justifies a grand jury in finding a bill of indictment is sufficient in the one case, but such positive proof as would require the court to enter up judgment and award execution is absolutely necessary in the other.
Horace Mann: “Such reasonable suspicion of guilt as justifies a grand jury in finding a bill of indictment is sufficient in the one…”
Editor's note · Context
Mann contrasts the legal standards required for criminal cases versus those for alleged slaves.
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The liberty of voting includes all other liberties.
Let me read to you the disparaging and contemptuous remark of the address on that great palladium of human liberty, the trial by jury.
These are but specimens of what the Fugitive Slave law has already done, before the public mind has become familiarized with its brutalities, and while there is yet some sensibility to the claims of justice and mercy left among us.
I answer, that this difference which they so be-little and disparage will often be all the difference between freedom and bondage, between life and death, between honor and infamy, between happiness and perdition.





