Preston university professor calls for women to be pardoned 400 years after [View all]

they were executed for Witchcraft

Robert Poole, Professor of History at the University of Central Lancashire, says the issue is important to justice today, over 400 years later.

He said: “This case is important in 2021 as it teaches us that if we identify members of a community, however marginal, as some kind of ‘other’, that it’s going to lead to other miscarriages of justice.”

A petition on the Parliament website states that the trial was ‘a political and religious persecution’, and a pardon is ‘long overdue’.

It continues: “The trial itself changed legal precedent by using a child of only nine to convict members of her own family; it concluded with no defence testimony or sound evidence and involved the use of coercion and torture. We seek justice.”

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/598232

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