Techotic

It was hard in those days. If your neighbors hated you all they had to cry out is that you were a witch and your head would be rolling the next morning (of course they needed some trumped up evidence to make this happen). from the 14′th to the 18′th century, several thousand witches were executed in Europe by the Catholic church and local governments.

Now Switzerland has just cleared the last name of one of one of those so called witches from its book. Goeldi, who was executed in 1782 was a maidservant and mistress to Tschudi. She was executed after she was accused for causing a girl to spit up pins and convulse. Now, 200 years after her death she has been freed. She was the last person on the books whose names were wiped away for supposedly practicing witchcraft.

Now I’m not saying half the executions were based on false claims, but witchcraft was practiced back then, so its quite stupid for us to think that all the trials were based on pure superstition.

Last year, the canton’s executive branch and the Protestant Church council both rejected considering an exoneration. The government said then it saw no need to make a “celebratory apology for injustice 225 years ago.”
The Glarus government has said that the Protestant Church council, which conducted the trial, had no legal authority to do so and had decided in advance that Goeldi was guilty. She was executed even though the law at the time did not impose the death penalty for nonlethal poisoning.
Goeldi’s execution was even more incomprehensible as it happened in the Age of Enlightenment when “those who made the judgment regarded themselves as educated people,” the government said.
“In spite of that they tortured an innocent person and had her executed, although it was known to them that the alleged crime was neither doable nor possible and that there was no legal basis for their verdict.”
The exoneration also was an acknowledgment that an unknown number of other innocent people whose cases cannot be reviewed had been killed over the centuries. The Glarus government did not assume any responsibility, however, for past wrongdoings.

[via news.aol]