The defendants, represented by John Adams and James Otis,⁵ pleaded
that, under acts of and , they were entitled to trial by a jury chosen
from inhabitants of the shire or county in which the trial was held, namely
Suffolk County, Massachusetts.⁶ But the plea was denied, and the special court
proceeded to try the case without a jury.⁷
No one can say what might have happened if the court, in which trial by
jury was denied, had found the men guilty. The feeling against impressment
and the denial of trial by jury ran so high in the colonies that there might well
have been an attempt forcibly to rescue the convicted men from jail and a re-
sulting clash between Bostonians and the British armed forces at Boston even
more bloody than the Boston “Massacre” ten months later.⁸ But after exam-
ining the witnesses, the court (June ) acquitted Corbet and his companions
on a verdict of “justifiable homicide.”⁹
The court did not state the ground for its verdict. Presumably it was based
on one or both of the following grounds:¹⁰ that section of the wartime act of
Anne ch. (), forbidding impressment in the colonies except of desert-
ers from the royal navy, was still in force;¹¹ or that impressment was legal only
if authorized by a warrant to impress from the British Admiralty Board, and
that no such warrant had been issued to Panton or his commanding officer.
Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts wrote in of the view held
throughout the colonies that impressment there was “illegal by virtue of a
Clause in a statute of Queen Anne,”¹² and in June, , a Boston town meet-
ing adopted an instruction to the town’s representatives in the Massachusetts
House of Representatives, maintaining that the act of Anne ch. sec. was
still in force and prohibited impressment, except of deserters, in the colonies.¹³
But, apparently, the court’s decision was based solely on the second ground.
Thomas Hutchinson, who was a member of the court, stated in the third vol-
ume of his The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay, that the deci-
sion had been based on the lack of the required admiralty warrant for impress-
ment. He wrote that “neither the lieutenant nor any of his superior officers were
authorized to impress, by any warrant or special authority from the lords of the
admiralty; and the court (the commanding officer of the King’s ships being one
of the commissioners) was [therefore] unanimously of opinion that the prison-
ers had a good right to defend themselves...and ought to be acquitted....”¹⁴
This explanation, though suspect because written long after the event,¹⁵ is
credible. As Crown officers, the members of the court presumably would choose
to hold Panton’s action illegal on the narrow ground of his lacking the required
warrant for the particular impressment at issue, rather than on the broad ground
that the act of Anne ch. prohibited any impressment in the colonies.