The actual amount of Spaniards that were murdered was two, the chef and the captain, and two others had gotten away. The captured people on the ship were all free Africans, according to the court in the film. Something they do not include in the film is that "Some of them ranged to what one writer as described as 'mulatto bright' from 'ebony to dusky brown'" (R Edward Lee, para. 11). The film shows them all to have very dark skin. They are all shown to be young men as well. Among the captured slaves there was also three young girls and one older man. The film also does not show that there was actually one slave among them that was not African. The slaves name was Antonio Gonzalez. He was a young boy, half black and half white, born in Cuba. He was a slave because his mother was a slave. It is said that he may have returned back to Cuba with Ruiz and Montez or he stayed in the United States with the Abolitionists. There is not much information on him, which may be one of the reasons to why he was not included in the movie. Also he would have ruined the whole message of the movie as well. The whole story of the movie is to show how unjustly the captured people on the ship were treated. The people only saw it as unjust in the movie because they were originally free; Antonio had been a slave all his life. "Most importantly, the message of the Amistad rebels, who killed their captors and yet captured the sympathy and imagination of northern Americans, reverberated in the expanding militancy against slavery" (Marcus Rediker 147). This event was actually one of the causes of the civil rights movement. They later made up the law that Africans were only 2/3 people. As the people dealt with this law, they saw the many flaws and injustices within it. As well as what they will see with the trial, when they begin to see that the Africans are people, too.
There were two trials held for the Africans, one in the district court and one in the Supreme Court.