Pressure can force people into doing deranged actions. When innocent people plead guilty or make incriminating statements the main reason is because they feel guilty or know more inside information. There have been many cases in which an innocent person was secretly blackmailed or forced into pleading guilty. The mental state of a confessor is also vital in knowing the truth. Confessions from juveniles is usually unreliable because most of the time they don’t understand the situation completely and they can also be manipulated easier than an adult could. Mentally capable adults confess when they’re innocent for a variety of reasons, exhaustion from excessive interrogation,a belief that they could be released if they confessed,or that they truly do feel guilty. Pressured confessions are less common, but there have been cases. False confessions are a hazard in trial cases and can also give an innocent person a cruel sentence. There were many cases of false confessions. One of which is the “Salem Witches trail.” Many people falsely confessed for different reasons. Tituba was the f...
The Salem Witch Trials occurred from 1692 to 1693. When two girls, aged 9 and 11, started having strange and peculiar fits, the Puritans believed that the cause of these actions was the work of the devil. The children accused three women of afflicting them: Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne. Tituba was a Caribbean slave owned by the Parris family. Sarah Good was a homeless woman. Sarah Osborne was a poor elderly woman. Sarah Osborne and Sarah Good pleaded innocent. Tituba admitted, “The Devil came to me and bid me serve him.” She described seeing red cats, yellow birds, black dogs, and a black man who asked her to sign his “book”. She confessed to signing the book. All three wo...
When one evokes The Salem Witch Trials of 1692, the image that comes to most peoples minds are that of witches with pointed hats riding broomsticks. This is not helped by the current town of Salem, Massachusetts, which profits from the hundreds of thousands of tourists a year by mythologizing the trials and those who were participants. While there have been countless books, papers, essays, and dissertations done on this subject, there never seems to be a shortage in curiosity from historians on these events. Thus, we have Bernard Rosenthal's book, Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692, another entry in the historiographical landscape of the Salem Witch Trials. This book, however, is different from most that precede it in that it does not focus on one single aspect, character, or event; rather Rosenthal tells the story of Salem in 1692 as a narrative, piecing together information principally from primary documents, while commenting on others ideas and assessments. By doing so, the audience sees that there is much more to the individual stories within the trials, and chips away at the mythology that has pervaded the subject since its happening. Instead of a typical thesis, Rosenthal writes the book as he sees the events fold out through the primary documents, so the book becomes more of an account of what happened according to primary sources in 1692 rather than a retelling under a new light.
``In criminal law, confession evidence is a prosecutor’s most potent weapon’’ (Kassin, 1997)—“the ‘queen of proofs’ in the law” (Brooks, 2000). Regardless of when in the legal process they occur, statements of confession often provide the most incriminating form of evidence and have been shown to significantly increase the rate of conviction. Legal scholars even argue that a defendant’s confession may be the sole piece of evidence considered during a trial and often guides jurors’ perception of the case (McCormick, 1972). The admission of a false confession can be the deciding point between a suspect’s freedom and their death sentence. To this end, research and analysis of the false confessions-filled Norfolk Four case reveals the drastic and controversial measures that the prosecuting team will take to provoke a confession, be it true or false.
Another reason Tituba’s could have been accused of witchcraft is because of her stature. She was Samuel Parris’s slave. He was the minister in town and he had lots of influence in the community. If he realized his daughter was lying about her accusations, he could have forced Tituba to admit to conspiring with the
Tituba confessed to practicing witchcraft and signing on with the devil after she was accused even though she was innocent. Naturally, many people that were accused of being witches chose to plead guilty because it was the only way that they would be able to live.
As the story of Tituba unfolds, it reveals a strong and kind hearted young woman, very different from the Tituba we meet in The Crucible. I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem unveils for the reader, Tituba's life, loves, and losses. Her long and arduous journey through life is inspired by her many female counterparts, yet also hindered by her insatiable weakness for men, who also press upon her the realities of life.
The Salem Trials took place between the 10th of June and the 22nd of 1692 and in this time nineteen people. In addition to this one man was pressed to death and over 150 people where sent to jail where four adult and one infant died. Although when compared to other witch-hunts in the Western world, it was ‘a small incident in the history of a great superstition,’ but has never lost its grip on our imagination’ . It’s because of this that over the last three centuries many historians have analysed the remaining records of the trials in order to work out what the causes and events were that led to them.
Breslaw was a Professor of History from Morgan State University and is now an author and speaker. In her essay Tituba 's Confession: The Multicultural Dimensions of the 1692 Salem Witch-Hunt Elaine focuses on the cultural aspects of a certain individual named Tituba. Her confession, blending elements from English, African, and American Indian notions of the occult, was of key significance in the shaping of the bizarre events at Salem.8 During this time period people believed that magic and Satan coexisted. When Tituba was accused of being a witch rather than denying it, she accepted it and confessed. Tituba used her cultural background as a safe zone and made the Puritans believe in her being a regular slave trapped by forces out of the human realm.9 When this was happening there was not enough records to prove that the cultural background of a slave. By looking at the multicultural background of a single person shows that people did what they had to, to survive this chaos. Another author Isaac Ariail Reed writes Deep Culture in Action in order to further explain the sociological culture. Salem Witch Trials was considered moral panics which were built up out of resignification, a specific kind of public, communicative work that achieves its ends via Synecdoche and metanarrative.10 The Salem Witch Trials were a disproportionate response and by far the largest, the deadliest, and the most emotionally charged event.11 The trials occurred during a time of high anxiety
In Arthur Miller’s book “The Crucible” there is an inadequacy of honesty which is a very important trait for everyone to learn. In this essay I am writing to prove that the paucity of honesty is negative and was very prevalent in Salem, and that very few people remained truthful throughout the Salem Witch Trials. The dishonesty in The Crucible would soon lead to the deaths and imprisonment of many residents in Salem. Those accused would lie and accuse other people of staying out of trouble from the authorities, but this took the lives of many innocent victims. In Miller's book Dishonesty is expressed by almost everyone included in The Crucible such as Abigail, Mary, and Elizabeth.
The background of Tituba is not well known, but she was more known as a slave broughten in from Barbados that was bought by Samuel Parris. The circumstances (being accused of witchcraft and being a witch) that enclosed within Tituba’s confessions and her denials of ever being a witch (Elaine G. Breslaw. Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies) When Tituba was being examined to see if she truly was a witch, she had confessions that she claimed to be true.
John M. Murrin’s essay Coming to Terms with the Salem Witch Trials helps detail the events of these trials and explains why they might have occurred. The witch trials happened during a “particularly turbulent time in the history of colonial Massachusetts and the early modern atlantic world” (Murrin, 339). Salem came to be in 1629 and less than seventy years later found itself in a mess of witch craft.
Hinds, Maurene J. Witchcraft on Trial: From the Salem Witch Hunts to the Crucible. Library ed. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow, 2009. Print.
During the 1690s, the Salem Witchcraft Trials occurred. However, they did not start in Salem, they occurred first in Danver (Starkey vii). This atrocity of an event was first started because of the fantasies of very little girls. These girl’s accusations created the largest example of witch hysteria on record (Starkey viii). During this time, the authorities had arrested over 150 people from more than two different towns (Gragg ix). Salem however, was not the only town that had girls saying there were witches in their town (Godbeer ix). Many people tried to escape, but that didn’t go to well for them (Godbeer x).
Depending on what study is read, the incidence of false confession is less than 35 per year, up to 600 per year. That is a significant variance in range, but no matter how it is evaluated or what numbers are calculated, the fact remains that false confessions are a reality. Why would an innocent person confess to a crime that she did not commit? Are personal factors, such as age, education, and mental state, the primary reason for a suspect to confess? Are law enforcement officers and their interrogation techniques to blame for eliciting false confessions? Regardless of the stimuli that lead to false confessions, society and the justice system need to find a solution to prevent the subsequent aftermath.
The notorious witch trials of Salem, Massachusetts occurred from June through September. It is a brief, but turbulent period in history and the causes of the trials have long been a source of discussion among historians. Many try to explain or rationalize the bizarre happenings of the witch hunts and the causes that contributed to them. To understand the trials and how they came to be, we must first examine the ideals and views of the people surrounding the events. Although religious beliefs were the most influential factor, socioeconomic tensions, and ergot poisoning are also strongly supported theories. A combination of motives seems the most rational explanation of the frenzy that followed the illness of the two girls. This paper looks closely at the some of the possible causes of one of the most notable occurrences in history.