Search results
While Howe says that most often witch accusations were a case of “women policing the behavior of other women” when they failed to fulfill gender norms, The Witch does provide a window into the ...
- Witch Trials: Guilty Until Proven Innocent
- Admission of Hearsay Evidence & Lack of Defense Counsel
- Witch Trials relied on Spectral Evidence
- Legal Legacy of The Salem Witch Trials
When an accused witch appeared in front of the Court of Oyer and Terminer during the Salem witch trials, the law assumed they were guilty. Today, the presumption of innocence, or the idea that an individual accused of a crime is “innocent until proven guilty,” is one of the fundamental rights underlying the U.S. criminal justice system. With roots ...
According to Len Niehoff, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School who has taught seminars on the Salem witch trials, the U.S. legal system “includes two vital protections that were absent in Salem, making the tragedy almost inevitable.” The first is the hearsay rule, a complex legal doctrine that essentially prevents the use at trial o...
The Court of Oyer and Terminer also relied heavily on spectral evidence. This evidence, according to U.S. Legal.com “refers to a witness testimony that the accused person’s spirit or spectral shape appeared to him/her witness in a dream at the time the accused person’s physical body was at another location.” The court’s acceptance of spectral evide...
On October 29, 1692, Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer, a decision that marked the beginning of the end for the Salem witch trials. By May 1693, Phips had pardoned and released all those remaining in prison on witchcraft charges. In the years to come, judges and juries (and even one of the main accusers) apologized for their roles in t...
- Sarah Pruitt
Nov 4, 2011 · The infamous Salem witch trials began during the spring of 1692, after a group of young girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts, claimed to be possessed by the devil and accused several local women ...
The Puritan gender norms of a wife were women as mothers, caretakers, and homemakers. If one stepped outside these roles, they were easily targeted as witches and seen as servants of Satan. Puritans lived in a patriarchal society were women disparaging other women were also common. The letter referred to the young girls as “Visionary girls ...
Aug 31, 2023 · Aside from gender, women were often accused because of religion, economic status, age, their influence on society or a combination of all the above. Teenage girls were the more common age group to target, but 4-year-old Dorothy Good was also questioned and accused of being a witch during the Salem witch trials.
Yes, Tituba declared, she was a witch, and moreover she and four other witches, including Good and Osborn, had flown through the air on their poles. Soon, according to their own reports, the spectral forms of other women began attacking the afflicted girls. Martha Corey, Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Cloyce, and Mary Easty were accused of witchcraft.
Oct 25, 2019 · In Salem, 14 of the 19 people found guilty of and executed for witchcraft during that cataclysmic year of 1692 were women. Across New England, where witch trials occurred somewhat regularly from 1638 until 1725, women vastly outnumbered men in the ranks of the accused and executed. According to author Carol F. Karlsen’s “ The Devil in the ...
