The Torturer's Dilemma: Analyzing the Logic of Torture for Information

John Bridges (whose own wife and daughters had been accused and arrested) urged her to confess for:
“God would not have let 'so many good men to be in such an error about it,' and she would surely hang
like the rest if she did not admit it.” (Roach, p. 279) Similarly, when Margaret Jacobs recanted her
confession in late August, she explained that she had confessed “to save my life and to have my
liberty.” (Gragg, p. 164) By this point the deceptive cycle has become firmly established: the accused
was presented with a choice of lying and living or telling the truth and dying, while the Court had made
clear they would not accept any story other than confession, accompanied by the naming of names.
How did this perverse incentive structure become established? Why were those who maintained their
innocence so much more likely to face death, and those who 'admitted' their pact with Satan more
likely to survive?
The answer lies in the prior beliefs of the magistrates. Unlike the previous New English trials,
in 1692 the authorities had become convinced (through the evidence presented by the afflicted, but
above all by the earlier confessions) that witches were conspiring with each other to overthrow the
government. 64 This was in stark contrast to how English law had traditionally viewed witchcraft, as
primarily a crime of maleficium – that is, working evil on another – which could be punished not for
the heresy implied, but the physical harm caused by others, and which did not imply any particular
organization by the malefactors. (Gragg, p. 10; Reed, p. 228) Once the outlines of this conspiracy
became clear to the elites, the importance of the trials no longer lay in the punishment of previously
worked witchcraft, but the rooting out of this network of witches – and that meant finding the names of
other witches still hidden in the community. In other words, it was more important to the judges that
the witches be discovered than that they be executed. And trying these discovered witches would
involve gathering testimony not solely from the afflicted, but from other witches who could place them
at the witches meetings, and witnessed them acting in covenant with Satan.
Consequently, those who confessed – and named others not already proven to be witches –
made themselves necessary to the running of the trials: their testimony in court would be necessary not
only to discover witches, but also to act as witnesses of their compact with the Devil – and it was this
compact that was the crime that the authorities feared most of all. Confessors then were not excused
64 That witches were organized into a political project aimed at overthrowing the state in favor of diabolical rule was
asserted by no less an authority than Cotton Mather himself in his report on the trials in his Wonders of the Invisible
World: “Now, by these Confessions 'tis Agreed (…) that at prodigious Witch-Meetings the Wretches have proceeded so
far as to Concert and Consult the Methods of Rooting out the Christian Religion from this Country, and setting up
instead of it, perhaps a more gross Diabolism than ever the World saw before.” (excerpted in Mappen, p. 22)
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