Slaves are brutally beaten and tortured, yet no punishment is inflicted.[1]
Indeed, in most cases, it would be impossible to convict the criminal, since the evidence of a slave is not received against a freeman, and slaves must commonly be the only witnesses of murders or outrages committed by planters or overseers. Severe laws may be safely passed where the only available evidence is to be rejected. In Greece and at Rome the slave lay under the same incapacity of appearing as a witness, saving that his evidence might be taken under torture, and was then regarded by the learned in the law as forming a useful supplement to the evidence given upon oath by the freeman. “You know, gentlemen,” says a Greek advocate to an Athenian court, “that the strongest evidence is produced when there are a number of witnesses both slave and free; and when the freeman can be compelled to speak by the administration of an oath, for which a freeman cares most, and slaves by pressure of a different kind, which, even though they may die under it, forces them to speak the truth.”[2] And an Attic comedian recites, with ghastly pleasantry, the different modes in which the torture was applied to the slave witness by the most civilized of mankind.[3] But the law of Moses, when it fixes the number of witnesses requisite to convict a murderer, draws no distinction between the evidence of a freeman and that of a slave.[4]
