Back in 1612, in England, a peddler was walking down the road when he was approached by a young beggar girl, Alizon Device, who was in need of some needles.
The peddler refused to take off his pack to pull out the needles and so Device, according to the official record, summoned the devil, in the form of a talking black dog, and cursed the peddler, who fell down moments later, unable to speak.
Device, unsurprisingly for the era, was picked up by the local Justice of the Peace, and through a series of investigative techniques that involved asking people to name other witches (including, famously, her nine year old sister) were able to find 12 of the foul wretches, who were ultimately hanged for the offence of witchcraft.
Now, some of these women might have actually been practicing “witches”. In that day and age, many women on the margins of society were able to eke out a living by traditional medicine, as well as selling talismans and charms, but a few year’s before the incident, in 1603, King James I (he of the King James Bible) had taken the throne.
In addition to the bible, King Jim was best known for writing a book, Daemonologie. He was convinced that witches in Scotland were conspiring against him, and instructed his followers that they must denounce and prosecute any supporters or practitioners of witchcraft.
A year after he became king, a law was enacted imposing the death penalty in cases where it was proven that harm had been caused through the use of magic, or corpses had been exhumed for magical purposes.
So, this traditional practice of witchcraft as a way for some women to survive in an era where there wasn’t a lot of things that a woman could do, other than be a wife or a mother, ran afoul of this new law, and a dozen people were killed.
It was nothing new, nor did it mark the end of this practice. In the four hundred years after this, 500 women in England were killed for being witches. Across Europe and America in the same time, that number was closer to 50,000, including the famous Salem Witch Trials, where 200 people (including men) were accused, 19 were hanged, one man was crushed to death while being tortured for a confession and five died in jail.
From our more enlightened viewpoint, we can see that for most of them, their only crime was that they were older women. Indeed, about 80 percent of those convicted were women.
If someone were accused of being a witch because they talked to someone who had a stroke moments later, our justice system would not even entertain the case. We have, as a society, learned the medical causes for a stroke, and realized those are not caused by demon dogs.
As our legal system evolves, things that were once criminalized are now treated in other ways, but even up until 1973, there was a law on the books in BC that allowed institution superintendents to “recommend sterilizing inmates who might pass on ‘serious mental disease or deficiency’,” according to the Canadian Encyclopedia. In 40 years, up to 400 people—frequently indigenous women, were sterilized because of illness and poverty and being “unfit” to bear children, and not because of government policies that imposed poverty and poor health on First Nations people.
These days, we (hopefully) realize that these laws were influenced by the theory of Eugenics, and that what happened was legal, yes, but also reprehensible.
Which is to say that laws aren’t perfect, and the justice system has to constantly be updated.
In the 1760s, jurist William Blackstone wrote “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”
Which is a far cry from the “kill all witches” of the earlier law, and has become one of the key tenants of the modern legal system. “Innocent until proven guilty,” is another common idiom.
In Canada, the justice system has seen similar reform. It has become harder and harder to persecute people for certain actions. We might lament the fact that weapons were returned to the attacker’s house, but many are also lamenting the fact that the government is outlawing certain weapons. The laws exist not just to punish, but to help foster a civil society.
After the attack here in Tumbler, and up until today, people have pointed fingers at the RCMP for returning the weapons, but they are only enforcing the law, and the law is always changing to meet the ideals of a just and equitable society.
Yes, we want justice, but we also want fairness. And for every criminal released, only to return to their criminal ways, there’s also a David Milgaard, who spent 23 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. The Central Park 5, some who spent 13 years in prison before someone else confessed to the crime.
Do we want to live in a society that leans to far that way—imprisoning and convicting people in error—or the other, where sometimes bad people return to the street? In a perfect world, justice would be served where it needs to be served, and mercy would be given where it needs to be given, but we live in a fallen world and the chances of us striking the right balance is slightly less than that of the sun exploding.
There’s always been these groups of people who have sat uncomfortably at the edge of the law. Witches. Women. Indigenous People. People with mental health issues. And, while we like to think we’ve progressed well beyond the Pendle witch trials, it was just last year in Burundi that six people were killed on suspicion of practicing witchcraft. In India, five people were burned alive by a mob on suspicion of the same. And on February 9 of this year an autistic 15-year old boy in Surrey with was shot and killed by the RCMP.
It can be hard to trust the legal system when you personally run afoul of the Blackstone Ratio. When someone goes free and goes on to commit a horrible act against you, your loved ones, your community. It’s easy to lose faith in the government when the laws they create to protect us harms us instead. It sometimes seems like two steps forward and one back.
But at least we are—sometimes despite appearances—still moving forward.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
