THE US: Profile of US Supreme Court nominee, Judge John Roberts.
"The people crying kill them! kill them! knock them over! heaving snowballs, oyster shells, clubs, white birch sticks three inches and an half diameter, consider yourselves, in this situation, and then judge, whether a reasonable man in the soldiers' situation, would not have concluded they were going to kill him."
The soldiers were members of the 29th Regiment of Foot and they had been accused of murdering five Boston citizens.
However their lawyer, John Adams, a patriot who went on to become America's second president, was able to prove, with the argument cited above, that the soldiers fired in self-defence.
Adams's successful defence of the soldiers was cited by John Roberts, President Bush's nominee to the Supreme Court, in his confirmation hearings for appointment as a federal judge two years ago, as proof that "the positions a lawyer presents on behalf of a client should not be ascribed to that lawyer".
While he has a reputation as a dispassionate lawyer who makes arguments devoid of ideological language, Mr Bush's nominee will be scrutinised by both sides for evidence that the positions he has presented should or should not be ascribed to him.
The litmus test for many partisans is the nominee's attitude to Roe v Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling which legalised abortion. In 1991 as a lawyer in the administration of president HW Bush, Roberts helped to write a brief stating: "We continue to believe that Roe was wrongly decided and should be overruled."
While this will raise a red flag for abortion rights groups, Roberts will seek to defuse their criticism - as he did in the 2003 hearing before the Senate judicial committee when he was approved for the federal bench - by pleading that he was simply representing his client, the US government.
He also said at the time: "Roe v Wade is the settled law of the land" and "there is nothing in my personal views that would prevent me from fully and faithfully applying that precedent".
Roberts's career is indication of strong conservative beliefs.
He served an apprenticeship with Justice William Rehnquist, now chief justice. He became associate counsel to president Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, and from 1989 to 1993 was deputy to solicitor general Kenneth Starr in the administration of the first President Bush.
While working for that administration, he wrote a brief stating that public high schools should be allowed to include religious ceremonies in their graduation programmes, which the Supreme Court rejected. The court also threw out a brief he co-wrote that would have made the burning of the American flag a crime.
In private practice, Roberts has supported corporate interests.
He supported the National Mining Association against the right of citizens to take legal action to prevent dumping debris from mineral extraction into streams and rivers. Yet he has argued both sides in affirmative action cases and fought for the rights of native Hawaiians in an action that was supported only by the Supreme Court's two most liberal judges.
After leaving government service in 1993, Roberts enjoyed a lucrative career at a prestigious Washington law firm, Hogan and Hartson, where he built a reputation as a successful litigator and a cordial, effective Washington insider. He argued 39 cases before the Supreme Court in private practice, 25 of which he won.
He joined the Federalist Society, a conservative and libertarian association of lawyers which opposes "orthodox liberal ideology" and is a member of the Republican National Lawyers Association. As a leading light in that group, he reportedly gave Florida governor Jeb Bush private legal advice during the 2000 presidential election recount on how to prevent Al Gore declaring victory in the state.
Since joining the federal appeals court two years ago, Roberts has given strong backing to the policies of the current administration. He was one of a three-member appeals court panel that last Friday ruled that the protections of the 1949 Geneva Conventions did not apply to al-Qaeda and its members, thus clearing the way for resumed military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay.
Roberts also supported efforts to keep secret the records of vice- president Dick Cheney's energy task force. He wrote an opinion favouring development over conservation which may worry environmentalists, arguing for reconsideration of a ruling protecting a rare California toad under the endangered species act on the grounds that the constitution did not allow the government to regulate activity affecting "a hapless toad that for reasons of its own lives its entire life in California".
This record has led many liberals to conclude that Roberts fully shares the conservative opinions he has consistently advocated. With a light touch and only two years on the federal bench, however, the paper trail of judicial decisions is however short and has left few hostages to fortune.
His record is certainly not as provocative to Democrats as was that of Justice Robert Bork, who was nominated by president Ronald Reagan in 1987 but rejected in a bitter Senate fight.
Within an hour of Bork's nomination, Edward Kennedy took to the Senate floor to oppose it: "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, children could not be taught about evolution."
This time, while voicing concern about Roberts's position on abortion, the environment and workers' rights, Senator Kennedy said he would not prejudge him until they heard what he had to say in response to questions at the judicial committee hearings.
Roberts's nomination to the federal bench in 2003 was opposed by liberal groups, including NARAL Pro-Choice America, and is likely to be opposed again.
There were many Democrats among the 146 members of the Washington DC bar who signed a letter praising his integrity and fair-mindedness and calling him "one of the very best and most highly respected appellate lawyers in the nation".
Robert was born in Buffalo, New York, and graduated from Harvard. For a time he was managing editor of the Harvard Law Review. He is married to Jane Sullivan, has two children and lives in Washington.