The court's central evidentiary problem was also its central moral failure: it admitted spectral evidence. Under this doctrine, the testimony of an afflicted person that they had seen the specter — the spirit-form — of the accused tormenting them was treated as valid evidence of witchcraft. The accused had no way to refute it. You cannot cross-examine a vision.
The theological debate over spectral evidence was not new in 1692. Puritan divines had argued for decades about whether the devil could assume the shape of an innocent person. If he could, then spectral evidence was worthless — the devil could frame anyone. If he could not, then a specter was proof of a compact with Satan. The court, under Chief Justice William Stoughton, effectively adopted the latter position.
It were better that ten suspected witches should escape than that one innocent person should be condemned.
Chief Justice William Stoughton disagreed. He allowed spectral evidence to be admitted and gave it substantial weight. The result was a legal process in which the accused had almost no defense: if the afflicted girls said they saw your specter, there was little you could say to refute it. Confession — which the court treated as the most reliable evidence of all — was the surest path to survival, though it required naming others as witches.
By the time the court was dissolved in October 1692, nineteen people had been hanged, one pressed to death under stones, and several others had died in prison. The legal reckoning came slowly. In 1711, the Massachusetts legislature passed a bill reversing the attainders of the condemned and providing compensation to their families. It was not until 2001 that the last of the accused were formally exonerated by the state.
