It's also worth mentioning that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850[1] made it a crime for police and private citizens in slavery-illegal states ("the North") not to arrest and return slaves to the estate that they escaped from. In effect, the "good people" in the entire country were still culpable of the continuing existence of that "Peculiar Institution".
I wonder what an average Northern jury person would think of prosecuting another Northerner who was charged with harboring a runaway slave in a Northern state (where slavery was illegal at the time). If the law says that the jury can only consider the facts of the case, not whether the law is just or moral/ethical, what are we to make of our legal system?
The great thing about Juries is that Jury nullification necessarily exists as well.
Juries are one of the most powerful institutions in the country, but they also have an extremely narrowly defined scope. Whatever the law, and whatever the facts of the case, a Jury has absolute power to find the defendant guilty or not guilty.
It's important to note that that power goes both ways, alas.
This quote from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States
is very much on topic: "Fewer than one percent of lynch mob participants were ever convicted by local courts and they were seldom prosecuted or brought to trial. By the late 19th century, trial juries in most of the southern United States were all white because African Americans had been disenfranchised, and only registered voters could serve as jurors. Often juries never let the matter go past the inquest."
I wonder what an average Northern jury person would think of prosecuting another Northerner who was charged with harboring a runaway slave in a Northern state (where slavery was illegal at the time). If the law says that the jury can only consider the facts of the case, not whether the law is just or moral/ethical, what are we to make of our legal system?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850