Fixed the “miscarriage of justice” that posthumously rehabilitated “witches” almost 375 years after their death sentence. Elected Connecticut officials passed a resolution Thursday protesting their innocence and denouncing the sentences passed on the nine women and two men who were long executed and accused of witchcraft. A victory celebrated by the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project.
Sarah Jack had connected with the descendants of these “heretics” there. Her ancestor had been convicted in a witch trial. In her late 40s, she began to identify somewhat with these women prosecuted for witchcraft, “usually after age 40,” she explained in a long-documented New York Times article in February.
Unlike eleven others, his relative had not been hanged in Connecticut in trials that lasted from 1647 to 1697. But two wives of his distant ancestors had been hanged in the famous and horrific trials of Salem in Massachusetts where there were as in Connecticut and four other wives in other states then forming New England.
A single “witness” might suffice
Women were most commonly accused, and a single “witness” could be enough to subdue someone. According to Beth Caruso, co-founder of the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, they were scapegoated by misogyny. Jane Garibay, the Connecticut state representative who sponsored the resolution, while more hostile to women and other marginalized groups, hoped the petition would come from the descendants of “witches.”
The decision comes on the eve of the 376th anniversary of the first ever execution for witchcraft in New England, the execution of Alice Young.
his wrong? “Historians believe she was accused of witchcraft during an epidemic that killed many children, including those of a family who lived nearby. When their only child, a daughter, survived, others claimed that their use of witchcraft kept the child alive,” summarizes the New York Times.
This rehabilitation is important for the future, says Sarah Jack. “Some people have to change the way they think,” she told the newspaper. And “we really want to weigh in that direction.”