In theory it was illegal in many state at the time for a slave owner to murder a slave, but it was so weakly enforced as to be all but legal. There were innumerable loopholes that allowed a white slave owner to legally kill a slave. All he had to do was say that the slave had attempted to escape, or had struck him, or was attending secret meetings, or had been found writing. In South Carolina if a slave even raised his hand to protect himself from a beating he could be legally killed. Short of murder without cause, rape, beating, and maiming were all quite legal.

One interesting protection that did see some use was that a slave generally could not be convicted of committing a crime that his master had explicitly instructed him to commit.