Satanism In The Crucible

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“I find it deeply upsetting when I see justice not being served. How do we as human beings deal with the unknown? The West Memphis Trial is a joke on so many different levels” - Atom Egoyan. The West Memphis Three case is one of the most famous trials ever as there was a documentary released covering the case. The documentary got nationwide attention and interest from celebrities like Johnny Depp, the most involved one of all. The reason this trial got so popular was for three reasons, the mystery factor as there was not solid evidence in the case, the fact that the three were prosecuted quite unjustly, and the fact that people got emotionally involved because they felt sympathy for the boys and or feared satanism; satanism was a major fear …show more content…

The argument for motive of the two situations is the same, which is satanism. In The Crucible, certain citizens of Salem were accused of conspiring with the devil. The devil then made them take witchcraft into fruition, and the judges would used how the defendants acted previous to the accusation as the “proof”. Judges would take anything that did not correlate with the common puritan lifestyle and paint a picture that they are not people of Christian faith. For example, if I were to accuse Sarah Good of satanism; I would discuss her second marriage and begging lifestyle which is heavily looked down upon. Now in the West Memphis Three, DamienDamian Echols was accused of Satanism. This is because the kids were killed in a more ritualistic way, and Damian had an abnormal appearance. Damian wore all black with black hair so it was easy to pin the satanism claim onto him, just like the Judges did to the defendants in The Crucible. A piece of evidence also used with the case was Jessie Misskelley's confession. Jessie’s confession is widely considered invalid because the methodology utilized to obtain the confession violated many police procedures. This confession can be compared to the Judges interrogating suspects, because the Judges widely wanted the outcome of guilty to be brought upon the accused. A sad aspect of the two situations is that both trials were more or less guilty until proven innocent. The last aspect as to why the trials were unfair is that both the citizens of Salem and the West Memphis Three were handed the same judge every time, which in the mass majority’s opinion is