“Connecticut Officials Proclaim Innocence of Witches Hanged 375 Years Ago”

The “miscarriage of justice” has been repaired, the “witches” posthumously rehabilitated almost 375 years after their death sentence. Connecticut elected officials passed a resolution Thursday proclaiming their innocence and denouncing the sentences handed down to the nine women and two men accused of witchcraft and hanged high and short. A victory hailed by the association Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project (Connecticut Witches Amnesty Project).

Sarah Jack had invested herself there with the descendants of these “heretics”. Her ancestor had been convicted in a witchcraft trial. In her late forties, she identified somewhat with these women prosecuted for witchcraft, “generally after the age of 40”, she explained in February, in a long documented article in the New York Times.

His relative had not been hanged as were eleven others in Connecticut, in trials which lasted from 1647 to 1697. But two women of his distant ancestry had been hanged in the famous and terrible trials of Salem, in the Massachusetts which, like Connecticut and four other states, then constituted New England.

A single “witness” could suffice

Women were most often accused, and a single “witness” could be enough to overwhelm someone. Misogyny made them scapegoats, according to Beth Caruso, who co-founded the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project. While as more hostile to women and other marginalized groups, Connecticut State Representative Jane Garibay, who had sponsored the resolution, was hopeful for the petition from the descendants of the “witches.”

The decision comes on the eve of the 376th anniversary of the very first hanging for witchcraft in New England, that of Alice Young.

His wrong? “Historians believe she was accused of witchcraft during an epidemic that killed many children, including those from a family who lived nearby. When her only child, a daughter, survived, others claimed that her use of witchcraft kept the child alive,” summarizes The New York Times.

This rehabilitation is important for the future, says Sarah Jack. “Some individuals have to change their way of thinking,” she told the daily. And “we really want to weigh in this direction”.