Salem, Massachusetts To Bring Back Witch Trials Following Clancy Trial Debacle
SALEM, Mass. — The City of Salem voted Monday to restore witch trials, citing the Lindsay Clancy case in Plymouth as the immediate cause.
Officials who reviewed the seven-week trial and the seven-day deadlock that followed said the modern system had identified a harm, heard the evidence, and then stopped. A mistrial was declared September 4. The charges remain. The jury list is sealed until September 18. Salem’s council called that sequence unfinished business.
“Clearly the current legal system is broken,” City Councilman Joe Sirius said. “You have a women who strangled her kids, admitted it, and a jury made up of psychotic women who almost acquitted her because feelings. I’d say they all need to be burned at the damn stake!”
The ordinance revives a municipal court for witchcraft. The filing does not describe the Clancy matter as a metaphor. It describes it as a neighboring example of a case that outran the available verdicts. Cora, Dawson, and Callan Clancy are named in the recitals as the dead. Lindsay Clancy is named as the defendant still held at Tewksbury State Hospital. The other liberal white women on the jury have also been named defendants.
“Plymouth asked twelve people to decide whether a woman who admitted killing her three children could be held responsible,” the mayor’s office said. “They could not finish the sentence. This city used to finish the sentence.”
Salem’s restored docket is scheduled for October, when the streets are already prepared for an audience. City attorneys said the older rules of proof would apply because they are shorter. A note from a deadlocked foreperson would not be required.
Plymouth County prosecutors declined to comment, citing an active prosecution. The district attorney has not said whether the case will be tried again. Salem’s clerk said that uncertainty was the point of the local measure: a town that once specialized in conclusive findings does not intend to specialize in status hearings.
The historical commission approved the language as heritage. The tourism board approved the calendar. The police department asked only that the first session not coincide with a parade.
A spokesperson for the city said the goal was civic closure. “We watched a county spend a month on experts and a week on doubt,” the statement read. “We are bringing back a process that knew what it was for.”
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