preview

Legal Issues In Amistad

Satisfactory Essays

“Amistad”

Amistad is a film produced by Steven Spielberg the person who created E.T and Jurassic park. la Amistad is based on the true story of the events in 1839 aboard the slave ship Amistad, during which Mende tribesmen abducted for the slave trade managed to gain control of their captors' ship off the coast of Cuba, and the international legal battle that followed their capture by a U.S. revenue cutter. The case was ultimately resolved by the Supreme Court in 1841.

The plot was that a Spanish slave ship called Amistad was traveling from Cuba to the U.S. As the ship is crossing from Cuba to the United States, Cinque, a leader of the Africans, leads a mutiny and takes over the ship. The mutineers spare the lives …show more content…

One of the astonishing facts revealed in Steven Spielberg's “Amistad” is that seven of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices in 1839 were slave-owning Southerners. His new film centers on the legal status of Africans who rise up against their captors on the high seas and are brought to trial in a New England court. Slavery itself is not the issue. Instead, the court must decide whether the defendants were born of slaves (in which case they are guilty of murder) or were illegally brought from Africa (and therefore had a right to defend themselves against kidnapping).This legal distinction is not made as clear as it could have been; the international slave trade had been outlawed by treaties by 1839, the year of the landmark Amistad incident, but those who were already slaves remained the property of their masters--as did their children. The moral hair-splitting underlying that distinction is truly depraved, but on it depends the defense of Cinque, the leader of the Africans, and his fellow mutineers. The film opens on the ship Amistad, where Cinque is able to free himself from shackles and release his fellow prisoners. They rise up against the Spanish crew of the ship, which is taking them from a Havana slave market to another destination in Cuba. The two men who bought them are spared, and promise to guide the ship back to Africa. But they guide it instead into

Get Access