The last Salem witch has been exonerated, thanks to an eighth-grade teacher and her students

by Mason Walker on Aug 23, 2022 Computers 146 Views

(CNN)It's never too late to right a historical wrong -- even if that restoration of justice comes nearly 330 years later.

Elizabeth Johnson Jr., a woman convicted of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials in the 1690s, was finally exonerated last week after years of petitioning by Massachusetts teacher Carrie LaPierre and her eighth-grade civics students. Justice came in the form of a brief addition to the 2023 state budget.
Johnson was accused of witchcraft in 1692 along with more than 200 other women and men in Salem. Of those convicted, 19 were hanged and four others died in prison -- Johnson was set to be executed, too, but was later spared.
And yet, during Johnson's lifetime and over the centuries that followed, her name was never actually cleared. It wasn't until Carrie LaPierre, an eighth-grade civics teacher at North Andover Middle School, came across her story and involved her students in her case that Massachusetts legislators took notice.
 
 

How to exonerate a convicted witch, 300-plus years later

North Andover, a town in northeastern Massachusetts, is only about 40 minutes from Salem. But until she'd read a book on local witches by historian Richard Hite, LaPierre said she had no idea how the Salem witch trials reverberated in the North Andover area -- and it was within those pages that she learned of Johnson.
While many other convicted witches were exonerated, many of them posthumously, the late Johnson -- or "EJJ," as LaPierre and her students called her -- had "somehow been overlooked while all other convicted witches had been exonerated over the years," LaPierre told CNN in an email.
Details of Johnson's life are slim, but her family was a major target of the Salem witch trials, driven by hysteria, Puritanical rule and feuding between families. She was one of 28 family members accused of witchcraft in 1692, according to the Boston Globe.
 

Article source: https://article-realm.com/article/Computers/26701-The-last-Salem-witch-has-been-exonerated-thanks-to-an-eighth-grade-teacher-and-her-students.html

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