Jury Trial

We publish to-day the law of Vermont, granting a jury trial to all persons claimed as fugitive slaves; also, an abstract of the law of Connecticut, and of the regulations that have been adopted in Pennsylvania in reference to the same subject. Laws extending the privilege of a jury trial to persons alledged to be fugitive slaves, have been passed in New Jersey and New York, but we have been unable to obtain copies of them for publication. In reference to the law of the latter State, the Friend of Man, says: "The slaveholder is obliged to get two freeholders in this State to be bail for his prosecution of the slave, before he begins. The slave is to be defended, at the expense of the County where he is arrested, and the District Attorney, or such able counsel, as the Court or Judge may appoint, is to defend the fugitive at the expense of the County, or more properly of the slaveholder's bond, if the slaveholder is unsuccessful; and then, what is infinitely more important to the fugitive, 12 men must one and all say he is a slave, "owing service"' to the claimant of his body and bones for life, before he can be delivered up." The Executive Committee of the Michigan A. S. Society, send a copy of this number of the Signal to each member of the Legislature, and hope they will read these articles with attention. They will observe, from the tenor of them, that the liberty of the colored population of the Free States needs the protection of the law; and while provision for the security of their rights has been made in several States, in Michigan they can be carried out of the State without a trial by jury, without any opportunity of obtaining witnesses or counsel, or an adjournment of Court, without knowing what is the testimony on which they are adjudged to be slaves. All the claimant has to do is to make proof satisfactory to the magistrate, that the person claimed is his property, and he can instantly seize him, and transport him out of the State at midnight, without a moment's warning, and, perhaps, without the person claimed having an opportunity even to see the face of the magistrate who has consigned him to slavery. There is reason to believe, that many free citizens of the Northern States, who never were slaves, have been thus kidnapped under the forms of law, and transferred to a state of bondage from which they never returned. These things ought not so to be. Humanity and good policy require that the rights of our citizens should be duly protected from the incursions of kidnappers: and that the claim which any citizen of the United States may have to property in immortal beings, should be decided, after a fair hearing, by the same tribunal that decides all other cases where the right of properly is contested- AN IMPARTIAL JURY.