How Did John Adams Get The Right By Trial

John Adams was a man who believed in the law, and in fair play. If the soldiers could not get a fair trial, were we any better than the British and their high handed ways.
John Adams knew he had to be the one, only a known radical could defend the soldiers. In the end, John Adams got most of the soldiers acquitted and the rest reduced to minor charges. The right by trial by jury was one of the rights the radicals were defending. The British were trying to limit trial by jury because too many smugglers were being acquitted.
In Congress, John was one of the most militant members. He was often called loud and obnoxious.
However it was John Adams who nominated George Washington as Commander in Chief. He worked tirelessly behind the scenes. John Adams was chairman of the committee that wrote the Declaration of Independence, he was chosen to go to France to back up Franklin working in France. These were major assignments given to a leader, though he may have been direct and blunt to the point of rudeness.
That was when John Adams, the man who later would be the second President of the United States, stepped in. He volunteered to defend the soldiers at no cost. He was already a prominent citizen of Boston and was identified with
Of the eight soldiers who were charged with murder, six were acquitted and two convicted only of manslaughter because of their own admissions that they had fired their rifles directly into the crowd. Adams reduced the sentence for these two by invoking the ancient rule of "benefit of the clergy," by having the two soldiers in question demonstrate that they could read from the Bible. While this looks like sort of a cheap trick to modern eyes, it also helped demonstrate the very frivolity of that ancient and outmoded rule -- these men were obviously not priests but soldiers. Nevertheless, Adams' maneuver reduced their sentence from death to a branding of their thumbs. All eight defendants were sent home to England