Charges.

In 1692 some teenage girls in Salem, Massachusetts, accused a West Indian slave named Tituba and two white women of practicing witchcraft. The girls behaved strangely and were subject to bodily fits. Most Puritans believed in witchcraft, and witches had been prosecuted in Massachusetts several times in the preceding decades. By April the girls began to denounce others as witches, including a former minister.

Hysteria.

The events that followed are notorious in American history. A special court was convened in which the judges were not trained in the law and in which the accused had no attorneys. The court violated precedent by agreeing to consider "spectral evidence" —testimony by an accuser that claimed that a specter (spirit) resembling the accused person was the source of the accuser's misery. Such a specter could only be seen, it was believed, by the victim, so...