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Posted: Friday, 20 October 2006 8:15AM
Pardons Sought in 17th Century Witch Hunt
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NEW LONDON, CT (AP) -- Justice is being sought for 17th century victims of Connecticut's witch hunts.
A group of Connecticut residents, some of whom are descendants of victims executed as witches, are calling on the state to issue pardons.
``We need to right this wrong,'' said Debra Avery, a ninth-generation descendant of an accused Connecticut witch. ``It's making a public statement that these people were all wrongly put to death.''
She and others have asked the state Board of Pardons and Paroles to exonerate the victims of Connecticut's witch trials. However, the agency says it pardons only the living.
Puritans in Connecticut interrogated dozens of accused witches between 1647 and 1663, and tried and hanged eight people.
Avery's ancestor was Mary Sanford, a 39-year-old mother of five who was accused of witchcraft by neighbors because she drank sherry at night in the woods behind her home. She was tried in Hartford, found guilty and hanged.
The witch trials in Connecticut ended when Gov. John Winthrop Jr. imposed standardized and objective evidence for trying witches.
Walter Woodward, Connecticut's state historian and a University of Connecticut history professor who has researched Connecticut's witch trials, questioned the call for pardons.
Most early settlers were deeply religious and believed strongly that the devil existed and worked through humans, he said. Accusations of witchcraft were taken seriously in the colonies, where settlers lived in fear of disease and attacks by Indians.
Witch prosecutors ``had the best interests of their communities at heart, he said. They were frightened, but they were not intentionally cruel or evil.
``We live in a different world today, and we look back and see things very differently,'' he said. ``But is it appropriate to make judgments on the past and should we be correcting past judgments?''
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