Colonial Crime And Punishment In Colonial America

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Katie Nistler Mr. Bashford English III period 3 1 December 2014 Colonial Crime and Punishment In colonial America, Puritan laws were so austere that even children as young as four years old were punished for petty slipups. In an attempt to purify the community, public officials used forms of torture, humiliation, and capital punishment to punish the person for his or her crime sometimes whether they had been proven guilty or not. Due to strict Puritan beliefs, severe punishments were dealt to those who committed any crime, radical or minor, or who were simply accused of such crimes. In cases of adultery, magistrates and jurors would decide the punishment of the man and woman involved. The result of the trial depended on the morals of…show more content…
Homosexual men and those who committed bestiality would receive a sentencing of execution on account of those having been considered the worst form of sodomy. Although, in the laws that were written pertaining to sodomy, relations between two women was never mentioned (Crompton 278). There was a great deal of discrimination in the newspaper reports about the convictions of those who committed sodomy. When referring to a non-white committing the crime, the newspapers would write about it so that it appeared that the act happened due to that race consisting of so many malcontents. When the article was about a white man or woman on the other hand, the article was written about how the individual was just at a troubled time in their life (Block…show more content…
The girls fell ill and were accused of witchcraft. After that, everyone was on edge, thinking that anything strange that happened was caused by someone around them who must have been a witch. Due to the paranoia, nearly everyone who was accused of witchcraft was sentenced to death or died as a consequence of extreme torture methods that were used to get the person to admit to being a witch. People were so convinced that everyone around them were witches that even those who said that persons who were convicted for witchcraft were con artists and liars were accused of witchcraft, Whether they had done anything that would suggest whether that the accusation was true or not. Sometimes, just to be safe, the accused’s family, related by blood or by marriage would also be accused. The penalty of witchcraft began with imprisonment until the prisons could no longer house so many people. Even though the general public was afraid of witches being in their midst, they were not sure that the trials were being ruled accurately and sometimes would even petition for the release of the accused. The exception to corporal punishment when one was convicted of witchcraft was if a woman was pregnant because they did not know if her child would also be a

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