• "To the problem of racial prejudice in American criminal
justice Glenn McNair brings his experience as a Georgia police officer,
an ATF agent, and a black man, the descendant of Georgia slaves.
McNair tracked down every extant capital trial record from Georgia’s
slavery era, looking at the beginnings of Georgia’s troubled
death penalty system. Every American interested in criminal justice,
racial prejudice, and the death penalty should read this book."—Christopher
Waldrep, San Francisco State University, author of Roots of
Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817–1880
• "In this well-written, nuanced study of slaves and
free blacks in Georgia’s criminal justice system, Glenn McNair
has broken new ground. McNair's analysis extends not only to slave
crime and its prosecution, but it also takes into consideration
juries, appellate court decisions and procedures, as well as many
issues not addressed in other studies."—James Denham,
Director of the Center for Florida History, author of "A
Rogue’s Paradise:" Crime and Punishment in Antebellum
Florida, 1821–1861
|
Criminal Injustice:
Slaves and Free Blacks in Georgia’s Criminal Justice
System |
| |
| Glenn McNair |
| 240 pages, 6 x 9 |
| Cloth 978-0-8139-2793-0 • $45.00 |
| Carter
G. Woodson Institute Series |
| May 2009 |
 |
Criminal Injustice: Slaves and Free Blacks in Georgia’s
Criminal Justice System is the most comprehensive study of
the criminal justice system of a slave state to date. McNair traces
the evolution of Georgia’s legal culture by examining its
use of slave codes and slave patrols, as well as presenting data
on crimes prosecuted, trial procedures and practices, conviction
rates, the appellate process, and punishment.
Based on more than four hundred capital cases, McNair’s
study deploys both narrative and quantitative analysis to get
at both the theory and the reality of the criminal procedure for
slaves in the century leading up to the Civil War. He shows how
whites moved from the utopian innocence of the colony’s
original Trustees, who envisioned a society free of slavery and
the depravity it inculcated in masters, to one where slaveholders
became the enforcers of laws and informal rules, the severity
of which was limited only by the increasing economic value of
their slaves as property. The slaves themselves, regarded under
the law both as moveable property and—for the purposes of
punishment—as moral agents, had, inevitably, a radically
different view of Georgia’s slave criminal justice system.
Although the rules and procedures were largely the same for both
races, the state charged and convicted blacks more frequently
and punished them more severely than whites for the same crimes.
Courts were also more punitive in their judgment and punishment
of black defendants when their victims were white, a pattern of
disparate treatment based on race that persists to this day. Informal
systems of control in urban households and on rural plantations
and farms complemented the formal system and enhanced the power
of slaveowners. Criminal Injustice shows how the prerogatives
of slavery and white racial domination trumped any hope for legal
justice for blacks.
Glenn McNair is Associate Professor
of History at Kenyon College and a former special agent with the
U.S. Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and
Firearms.
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