Rebecca Nurse: The Unjust Witchcraft Accusation

Rebecca Nurse was the embodiment of a kind, pious, and gentle citizen during the 17th century in Salem, Massachusetts. Having spent her entire life a devout Purist, Rebecca was hardly a typical candidate to be accused of such a heinous act such as witchcraft in 1692. And yet, she was violently taken from this world before her time had come, accused of afflicting girls through the medium of witchcraft, causing pain, suffering, and fits to such innocent younglings. How could someone who seemed so innocent be sentenced to the worst, cruelest punishment of all, death? A consensus on her innocence has been undisputed by historians and scholars since her travesty of a hanging.
The evidence against Rebecca Nurse was not particularly concrete, even

Some scholars attempt to make the claim that she was the turning point of the trials due to the fact that people began to wonder if someone as devout as Rebecca could be accused, what’s to say that any other innocent person could be thereafter accused? However this has been very difficult to prove as trials went on long after her death, and Martha Corey, another accused, can be considered for that role in the following trials (Smith). Surely her family had been jumping for joy at that verdict, but the happiness did not last long at all, when the public demanded a reconsideration on the jury’s decision, consequently ending in an overturning of the non-guilty result (Hansen 128-129). While this is considerably the worst possible situation for Rebecca, it did seem to be the wake-up call for the judges and priests, though this reaction was not instantaneous. Why did so many of these professional judges and jury members ignore their responsibilities by overturning their original judgement when she was so clearly

The Salem community began to full understand the terror that comes with the idea that the afflicted girls could claim any person, no matter how pious, no matter how respectable, to be a witch. Afflicted girls could base their claims solely on intangible spectral evidence, something only seen by the afflicted (which is not the case for every accused; for example, someone by the name of Samuel Gray hallucinated of Bridget Bishop “before he knew her or knew her name”), which would not be considered as any sort of concrete evidence in today’s criminal system as it can be easily abused and deceitfully fashioned (Hansen 68.) Autumn of that same year, spectral evidence was disregarded during evidence hearings for this very reason. Jurors were no longer allowed to consider this kind of evidence when determining the verdict of an