Alternate Dred Scott-like case.

Instead of the Dred Scott case hitting the Supreme Court, what about the following...

Steve Southron beats Nick Negro to death in Montpelier, Vermont in front of witnesses. Steve is arrested for Murder. Steve maintains that Nick was his slave that he bought in Maryland, but has no proof. Steve is convicted of Murder and sentenced to be Hung. This case makes it all the way to the Supreme Court. Does the court (assume this case gets there in 1857) throw out the conviction and tell Vermont to let Steve go free?

What about if Steve can locate the man who sold him Nick in Maryland?
 
Without proof the issue is in doubt. If there is evidence Nick Negro was a free man, then Steve is likely to face murder charges, although conviction is not a given in this politically-charged case. If there is no such evidence then Steve is likely to not even be charged with murder (Breach of peace or some such, but not murder). He won't necessarily have to prove that he owned Nick; as a white man he will be given the benefit of the doubt, even in Vermont.

We tend to think of the Union as a defender of racial equality; this is demonstrably false. Northerners were in most cases equally racist, just not as blatantly as Southerners. In a case like this Steve is likely to go free no matter what the facts are; he could claim that Nick assaulted him and he was defending himself, for one possibility.
 
But this case would be in state courts. Before Reconstruction, murder was entirely a state matter; the federal courts had nothing at all to do with it. Steve would have to sue in federal court to recover Nick as a fugitive slave; that was the one pertinent grant of federal jurisdiction.
 
Slaveholders who murdered their own slaves were sometimes convicted of murder even in the South. E.g., North Carolina v. Hoover case (1839-1840), where white murderer of a black female slave was convicted by a jury of 12 fellow slaveholders, sentenced to die, lost his appeal to the state's supreme court and was hanged on May 15, 1840, or Alabama v. Jones case (1843), where slaveowner-murderer was sentenced to 10 years of hard labour.

That is, if there is clear evidence (white eyewitnesses, that is) of murder, and our Steve Southron has no witnesses of his own - well, he will, most probably, die, as Vermont jury will be even less sympathetic to him than Southern juries were in similar cases.

And, of course, if Nick (fugitive slave or not) is dead, and Steve's conviction was obtained with due process of law being observed, there are no absolutely no grounds for federal courts to become involved in the case, as Evan rightly said. Murder in Vermont is Vermont's responsibility even today, much more so in 1857.
 
Dred Scott was decided in favor of Scott's putative owner on two grounds:

  1. Scott was (in the opinion of a majority of the court) not a citizen and therefore had no standing to bring suit in federal court.
  2. The law against slavery in the territories in question (the Ordinance of 1820) were (in the opinion of a majority of the court) a violation of the 5th amendment due process clause.
1 does not apply here, since the plaintiff in the original case being appealed to SCOTUS is a prosecutor acting on behalf of the State of Vermont, who unquestionably has standing to prosecute a Vermont murder case. It also makes a difference here that presumably Vermont's appeals courts would have upheld the conviction, whereas the Missouri Supreme Court had ruled against Scott: if the case is decided on grounds of standing in federal court, then it's as if the case had never been appeal to federal court, and the ruling of the state court it was appealed from stands unquestioned.

2 also does not apply in your hypothetical case. The fifth amendment due process clause applies only to acts of Congress, like most pre-14th-amendment protections in the US Constitution. It was not until the 14th amendment was ratified, with a second due process clause that explicitly applies to all levels of government, plus the incorporation doctrine, that the due process clause and other bill of rights protections were seen as applicable to acts of state governments.
 
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