Bewitched (2025) TV; Episode; Apology

Bewitched (2025) [rebooted] TV; Episode; Apology

Story Overview:

Darren's PR Firm is tasked with crafting an offical apology for the Salem Witch Trials.

The plan is to have the Massachusetts Governor issue a proclamation...

https://www.mass.gov/forms/request-a-proclamation-from-governor-healey

***preliminary** <<== much more to be added

Massachusetts has apologized for the Salem witch trials in several ways, including:?

• 1957 The General Court of Massachusetts issued a "Resolve" that acknowledged the trials were shocking and the result of a wave of fear.?The "Resolve" was an apology to the descendants of some of the executed witches.?
• 2001 The Massachusetts Trial Court named five additional women who were convicted of witchcraft and exonerated them.?This completed the exoneration of all those convicted in the trials.?
• 2022 Massachusetts exonerated Elizabeth Johnson Jr., who was convicted of witchcraft 329 years earlier.?Johnson's exoneration was the result of lobbying and research by an eighth-grade history class.?

Other events and people related to the Salem witch trials that demonstrate the state's efforts to atone include:?

• 1702:?The General Court declared the trials unlawful.?
• 1706:?Ann Putnam, Jr. apologized for her role as an accuser.?
• 1711:?Massachusetts passed legislation that exonerated those executed for witchcraft and paid restitution to their families.?
• Samuel Sewall:?A judge who publicly acknowledged his guilt and error in the proceedings.?Sewall worked to declare a day of public fasting and repentance five years after the trials.?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/10/31/massachusetts-witch-justice/

When Dorothy (sometimes called Dorcas in historical records) Good was arrested, she was accused of biting children and causing her alleged victims to grow “tormented” if she so much as looked at them. “Spectral evidence” such as visions and dreams was allowed into the courtroom, which helped lead to hundreds of charges of witchcraft, mostly against widows, indigent women and girls.

Among the more than 200 charged, only 31 — those executed or convicted without execution — have had their names formally cleared.

While Salem is the most infamous setting, witch hunts and trials existed throughout the Massachusetts Bay Colony and parts of what would later become Connecticut and Maine.

Some pardons and restitution in Massachusetts and Virginia came as early as 1711, but it would take until 1957 for Massachusetts to issue something of a formal apology for the witch trials. In 2007, then-Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine (D) granted a ceremonial pardon to Grace Sherwood, a woman whose trial in 1706 saw her thrown into a river with her thumbs tied to her feet to see if she floated.

Last year, Massachusetts exonerated 22-year-old Elizabeth Johnson Jr. — 329 years after she had been convicted in Salem — thanks to the lobbying and research efforts of an eighth-grade history class in North Andover, Mass.

“Some might wonder how exonerating a woman who lived three centuries ago has anything to do with today. But I was taught that we study history to understand our past mistakes,” student Sarina E. Miller wrote in a 2022 Washington Post opinion piece.

Earlier this year, the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project — which includes members from the Massachusetts group — helped secure the formal exoneration of those executed for witchcraft during the state’s Colonial past.

Hutchinson and his fellow authors, historians and decedents working with the Massachusetts Witch-Hunt Justice Project have circulated a petition in hopes of finally closing an ugly chapter in the Commonwealth’s history.

“We support exoneration because correcting injustice is always the right thing to do,” it reads. If people learn from the past, the petition argues, they can avoid repeating its mistakes.