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

We can thus see Tituba's confession as a parody of the ideal form of torture for information.
Rather than garnering true information for Parris in his search for his daughter's tormentors, instead the
pain caused information to spread in the opposite direction: Tituba learned through torture what sort of
confession to make, and what the wages of non-compliance would be. While her confession in court
was not brought about through torture by the judiciary, her confession depended on being tortured
nonetheless – to have maintained innocence under the circumstances would not only have meant facing
a trial she was likely to lose, but a master whose authority could only be imperfectly circumscribed by
the law, and the safety of whose own flesh and blood depended (in his view) on forcing Tituba to reveal
everything to the court. Consequently, her apparently irrational confession is in fact quite rational in
retrospect: she faced a choice between certain execution and torture if she did not confess, and certain
executed (but without being tortured) if she cooperated. It is only with this seemingly un-coerced
confession and the need for her testimony in court against those she had named that we can explain the
cycle of denunciations and confessions that followed: her confession convinced the judges that the
conspiracy was real, that the testimony of the afflicted was true, and that those indications that did exist
that things were not what they seemed could safely be ignored. 69
3.8. Conclusion
The Salem Witch Trials differed so strongly from previous trials in New England because the
authorities believed themselves to be confronting a secret and organized threat against God and
government, and because they unconsciously replicated the logic of coercive interrogation. Both of
these conditions were necessary for the creation of the deceptive cycle that tore through the wider
colonial community. The witch trials that had occurred in New England during the first 80 years of the
17 th Century were limited in scope because the crime of witchcraft was understood primarily as
maleficium – that is, as the use of black magic to harm neighbors or gain revenge: consequently, the
only goal of the authorities was to determine the suspect's innocence or guilt, with few social
69 An example of how the judges' assumptions (apparently validated through confessions) regarding spectral testimony
occurs during the trial of Sarah Good. As reported by Calef, “one of the afflicted fell in a fit, and after coming out of it
she cried out of [Good's specter] for stabbing her in the breast with a knife (…) Accordingly a piece of the blade of a
knife was found about her. Immediately (…) a young man (…) produced a haft and a part of the blade, which the court
having viewed and compared found to be the same. And upon inquiry the young man affirmed that yesterday he
happened to break that knife, and that he cast away the upper part (i.e., the blade piece found on the afflicted), this
afflicted person then being present. The young man was dismissed, and she was bidden by the court not to tell lies.”
The afflicted then went on to give further testimony to the court. (Hansen, p. 114)
72