In 1839, 53 kidnapped Mende people led by Sengbe Pieh (known as Joseph Cinque) seized control of the Spanish slave ship La Amistad, killing the captain and demanding passage back to Sierra Leone; the ship's navigator secretly steered north instead, and it was intercepted off Long Island. The captives were jailed in New Haven and tried for mutiny and murder in a case that became the most significant slavery-related Supreme Court decision before Dred Scott. In March 1841, the Court ruled the Africans had been illegally enslaved and acted in self-defense, freeing them after former president John Quincy Adams argued their case. A bronze memorial by sculptor Ed Hamilton now stands on the site of the former jail, in front of New Haven City Hall.