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Blog #9: The Final Exonerations


Over the last few weeks in class we discussed the aftermath of the Salem Witch Trials including the exoneration of many of the accused victims. It amazes me that it took so many years for many of the individuals who were falsely accused to have their names cleared. I wanted to first discuss the exonerations described in the chapter Redemption of “A Salem Witch.” This chapter covers all of the apologies and efforts to exonerate victims of the witch trials except for one exoneration which occurred in 2022. The exoneration occurring in 2022 was the final one to occur which means it marked the official clearing of every accused Salem Witch, or so we think. 

The first exonerations followed a series of apologies coming from Ann Putnum Jr., Judge Samuel Sewall, and twelve jurors from the Salem Witch Trials. What is interesting about their apologies is that they all blamed their actions on the devil and claimed that they were not their fault. Several years after these apologies came the petitions from family members of victims to ask for their exonerations. The family members finally succeeded in 1711, almost twenty years after the Salem Witch Trials, when they got 13/20 of convictions reversed for those who were executed. There were individuals who were not exonerated simply because no one petitioned for them. This meant that many victims who were killed innocently did not find their names cleared for an extremely long time after their execution. The next year that an individual was exonerated occurred in 1957 and the “remaining” individuals were exonerated in 2001 which was a whopping 200 years after their deaths. These last individuals had no one to petition for their innocence for almost 200 years which is a long time to be convicted for something you did not do. 

One final exoneration occurred just two years ago as the result of the efforts by an eighth-grade civics class. Elizabeth Johnson Jr. was not sentenced to execution during the Salem Witch Trials, but her name was never cleared from the witch trials. Like the other individuals exonerated last, she had no one to fight for her. It was believed that she was overlooked from exoneration during the previous exonerations due to an administrative oversight. The eighth-grade civics class petitioned to have her name cleared and succeeded with her name being cleared by the governor of Massachusetts in 2022. By finally having someone to petition her name, Elizabeth Johnson Jr. had her name cleared and became the last convicted witch to have their name cleared. With this in mind, I think it could be possible for there to still be other individuals out there who were falsely convicted and forgotten overtime who are still owed the clearing of their name. It will be interesting to see if any “forgotten” witches surface over the next decades or if Elizabeth Johnson Jr. will truly be the last convicted witch to have their name cleared. 

 

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