Legal Procedures Used During the Salem Witch Trials

The accusations of a handful of teenaged girls led to the one of the deadliest cases of mass-hysteria that this country has ever witnessed, the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. 20 people were eventually executed, including an old man named Giles Corey, who was crushed to death with heavy stones when he refused to confess. His famous last words were supposedly "More weight." His wife Martha was later hanged for witchcraft. Four other suspected witches died after languishing for months in prison. Even two dogs were executed for witchcraft!

Initially, three suspected witches were interrogated by two county magistrates, Jonathan Corwin, and John Hathorne. Far from being impartial, the questions that the magistrates asked the suspects were clearly slanted to elicit a guilty response. After one of the women, a slave named Tituba, confessed, an obsessive effort to root out other scions of Satan began.

John Hathorne was an ancestor of writer Nathaniel Hawthorne (who later added the "W"). This has given rise to the rumor that John Hathorne was one of the judges who condemned suspected witches to hang on Gallows Hill, and that this knowledge haunted the guilt-ridden Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hathorne was not a judge during the actual trials, however.

Following Tituba's confession, more "witnesses" came forward, fueling the hysteria, and increasingly more people were accused and jailed on charges of witchcraft, based solely on accusations. Suspects had virtually no rights, and were subjected to relentless grilling by both prosecutors and so-called witnesses. Testimony that today would be regarded as utterly ridiculous was admitted into evidence. The most common allegation was that the accused visited the victims while in spectral form, usually during the evening, pinching, slapping and tormenting them. When confronting the suspected witches in court, "victims" would obligingly fall into seizures -screaming, moaning and writhing- after being touched by the suspected witch.

Torture was obviously used to secure confessions, as the case of the unfortunate Giles Corey will attest. Whether this can be termed a "legal procedure" is questionable. Suspects were also subjected to humiliating body examinations, with prosecutors often pointing to moles or birthmarks as proof that the suspects were in league with the Devil.

Towards the end of the trials, in September of 1692, the accused witches found an unlikely ally in Increase Mather, a minister and father of Cotton Mather, who was friends with three of the five judges. In an essay titled Cases of Conscience, Mather argued that spectral evidence and "touching tests" should be inadmissible. As a result, nearly all of the remaining suspects were acquitted (Linder). 20 years later, all of those convicted of witchcraft were posthumously pardoned.

Sources

Linder, Douglas. "The Witchcraft Trials in Salem: A Commentary." University of
Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. 15 Aug. 2008.

"The Salem Witch Trials." Salem, Massachusetts The City Guide. 15 Aug. 2008.