## Facts

- Atlas Jowers, a white man, and Bob Douglass, a free Black man, exchanged accusations of lying.
- Douglass responded with language characterized as insulting toward Jowers.
- Jowers struck Douglass, and a fight followed.
- Douglass hit Jowers with a wagon whip.
- Jowers then knocked Douglass down using a tree limb.
- Jowers was indicted and convicted of battery after the trial court instructed that insulting language by a slave could excuse a white man’s blow, but insulting language by a free Black man could not.

## Issues

1. Whether insulting or insolent language by a free Black man could provide a legal excuse or mitigation for a white defendant’s battery, similar to the rule applied when the speaker was enslaved.
2. Whether the trial court’s instruction improperly prevented the jury from considering excuse and related self-defense theories tied to the escalation during the fight.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court of North Carolina reversed the battery conviction and ordered a new trial.
- The court held the trial court erred by distinguishing, for purposes of excuse, between insolence by an enslaved person and insolence by a free Black person.
- The jury should have been permitted to consider whether Douglass’s insulting language could excuse or mitigate Jowers’s initial blow and whether later force was justified in response to the wagon whip.

## Legal Principles

- Under the court’s rule, insulting or insolent language by a Black person, whether enslaved or free, could constitute a legal excuse or mitigation for a white defendant’s battery in circumstances recognized by prior doctrine.
- A jury instruction that categorically bars consideration of that excuse when the alleged insult comes from a free Black person is legal error.
- When evidence supports both an initial-excuse theory and subsequent self-defense based on escalation, the defendant is entitled to have the jury instructed on those theories under the governing standard.

## Conclusion

The court reversed Jowers’s conviction and granted a new trial because the jury was incorrectly instructed that insulting language by a free Black man could not excuse or mitigate a white defendant’s battery, even though existing doctrine recognized such an excuse when the insult came from an enslaved person.


State v. Jowers, 33 N.C. 555 (N.C. 1850)