Invisible Worlds and Criminal Trials The Cases of John Proctor and O. J. Simpson

Abstract

For the judges, jurors, witnesses, and even the accused in Salem, that terrible summer of 1692, the Devil's handiwork seemed everywhereeven in the courtroom where John Proctor stood accused of bewitching Abigail Williams and her friends. If only a handful of people, most of them servant girls, swore to have seen Proctor consort with Satan or felt Proctor pinch and pummel them, the court and the country believed that the Evil One could give witches the power to leave their bodies behind and afflict the innocent.] For the world, the world of the Evil One, was a vast conspiracy. The Devil lurked in the darkness, at the edge of the woods or in the marshes, luring the weak and the malicious into his web. Witches gained their powers from him and hid their secret pact with him behind a false face of respectability.2 Juries in early modern England and New England heard tales of the invisible and weighed them carefully, for reports of ghosts and magical potions were circumstantial evidence and had the power to sway triers of fact. They all knew that Ghosts came to people in the night, and trumpets blared, though no one saw the trumpeters. Phantom ships sailed on the mist and capricious sprites danced just beyond one's reach. Voices spoke from heaven and children from their cradles.3 It was a world of wonders, and most of them were ominous. The invisible world spoke in the courtroom with the tongues of the possessed, the afflicted, and the bewitched.4