Therry's argument also indicated that Aboriginal subjects of the Crown were entitled to the protection of British law and had to comply with British law. This suggested that Jim Crow and other Aboriginal people understood and accepted the implicit social contract between state and subject which afforded protection in exchange for submission to the law. Jim Crow's actions, however, suggest the contrary: he did not regard himself as part of the encroaching white society that he resisted, threatening to kill 'all the white settlers', and he did not feel himself bound by its laws or legal agents. Ultimately, he did not get its protection either. He was in effect a subject in name only, by foreign dictate, conferred without his consent through the Crown's claim of sovereignty over the lands of his people and others.

The individual beliefs and opinions of the jury members were randomised by alphabetical selection, but collectively they were white men who satisfied the property qualification for jury duty. Of the twelve jurors named in press reports of the trial, two were farmers but most were small businessmen and/or skilled tradesmen, with occupations ranging from publican and grocer to builder, upholsterer and glazier.⁴⁰ Most lived in Melbourne, but the ten-year-old town was not far removed in time from frontier settlement. As a group, they were likely to represent a similar social class to the Wimmera settlers, with perhaps similar perspectives. Also, press coverage of the impending case had promoted assumptions of police innocence and Aboriginal depredation and violence,⁴¹ which may have reflected or informed public opinion about frontier conflict. Overall, the jurors might well have been expected to sympathise with policemen who acted in defence of settlers' interests.

Their verdict was swift. Without retiring, they acquitted the three defendants of murdering Jim Crow.⁴² The prosecution then dropped charges relating to the killing of Charlie. The court never explored the dispersal of the camp where Charlie died.

Jim Crow's death was one of only two cases in Port Phillip in the 1840s in which whites faced a complete murder trial over Aboriginal deaths. The Muston's Creek massacre produced the other trial - and that through the inducement of a hefty reward of £100, or for convicts a pardon and passage to England, for Queen's evidence from 'any parties who were not principals in the first degree, or did not actually fire the shots causing death'.⁴³ The difficulty of securing admissible evidence, when so often the only non-Aboriginal witnesses to killings were the alleged offenders and their colleagues, had previously led to abandoned prosecutions and lesser charges, if charges could be laid at all. In 1837 the murder trial of convict shepherd John Whitehead, accused of shooting an Indigenous man tied to a tree on a station near Geelong, collapsed as it opened because the witnesses (and possible accomplices) had fled to Van Diemen's Land.⁴⁴ In 1839 murder charges against shepherds John Davis and Abraham Braybrook were dropped for insufficient evidence that they had shot two Aboriginal men near Mount Mitchell, although they were prosecuted for 'the misdemeanour of burning the bodies before any legal investigation took place'.⁴⁵ In 1841 squatter George Bolden was acquitted of shooting with intent to kill an Indigenous man on his Western District property; the murder charge on which he had been committed, based on information from an Aboriginal witness, was dropped before trial.⁴⁶

No Europeans in Port Phillip were found guilty of murdering Aboriginal people in this period. According to Robinson, Chief Protector of Aborigines, not until 1847 was a settler convicted for violence against an Indigenous person, receiving a bare two-month jail sentence for the shooting. In the same period, five Aboriginal men were hanged and four transported, two of them for life, for attacks on Europeans.⁴⁷

The acquittal of Daplin, Sparrow and Bushe in what he called a farce of a trial⁴⁸ prompted Robinson to report (not for the first time, and not for the last) on the human cost of forbidding Aboriginal testimony and of the 'unequal justice' that Aboriginal people had complained of. Settlers knew that the law's rejection of Aboriginal evidence allowed them, quite literally, to get away with murder. He wrote that 'there is reason to fear numbers of natives have been shot and others poisoned by the wicked disposed of the whites from the known fact of the natives being incapacitated to give evidence'.⁴⁹ Months earlier a squatter in the Wimmera had told him that settlers there opposed legalising Aboriginal testimony 'because so many are implicated in killing Natives'.⁵⁰ Legislation to accept Aboriginal evidence, Robinson now wrote, was 'not only requisite as a measure of justice but essentially necessary for the preservation of a race'.⁵¹ In the year Jim Crow died, however, the squatter-dominated New South Wales legislature had rejected just such a bill, fearful of a repeat of the hangings of whites convicted over the 1838 Myall Creek massacre.⁵² Similar bills also failed to win London's or Sydney's approval in 1839 and 1849.⁵³

Conclusion
The Jim Crow case demonstrates a pervasive inequity in colonial law in 1840s Port Phillip. For European settlers, the rule of law worked in their favour. They could seek protection of life and property through the magistracy and/or frontier police forces. If one did not satisfactorily meet their needs, another might. The agencies of the law helped to reinforce their occupation of land and legitimise their claim to it. The military style of frontier policing was not directed against them. Prosecutions of settlers for offences against Aboriginal inhabitants were few indeed, and convictions rarer still.

The rule of law, however, gave little protection and few practical rights to the Indigenous population. Nonviolent, discretionary policing could be nullified by settlers' superior legal access to squatter-magistrates and police. Aboriginal people might be subject to force under warrant, whereas others might be served with a summons. As complainants, they were reliant for practical reasons on European intermediaries. As witnesses, their evidence for culturally determined legal reasons was unacceptable. Instead, accounts from Europeans dominated the legal process, with judgement delivered by those likely to sympathise with settlers and feel adversely towards them. That two types of policing were employed in the hunt for Jim Crow illustrates that frontier police were not singularly or always hostile to Aboriginal people. That those who shot Jim Crow were prosecuted reminds us that the operation of colonial law was not uniformly and monolithically contrary to the protection of Aboriginal people and their interests. However, at each procedural stage, simple prejudice or systemic partiality operated. At each stage, Aboriginal subjects were denied in practice the full legal equality that they held in theory.

The ramifications of colonial criminal law for Indigenous people were felt most intensely outside the courtroom and in such places as the Wimmera plains. Acceptance of Aboriginal evidence was not simply a matter of legal process but of protection of human life. The imperial claim that Aboriginal people were subjects was expressed less by a prosecutor's avowal of equal protection than by the demand in police practice that they submit to rules they did not understand or consent to.