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Salem Witch Trials

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Salem Witch Trials
Ramsey Tehan 11/3/11 A.M. Block

The Salem Witch Trials

In the modern life we live today, with are social class and government, I envision that an incident similar to the Salem Witch Trials could not happen again. Over the years, our country evolved and matured to a level that could not make a silly mistake of blaming an innocent person for a crime that they did not do. Especially, punishing someone with death, for example how they solved the case trials in the 1690's. From the Salem Witch Trials alone 15 innocent men and women were drowned, hung, or burned to death just because they were accused of being a witch. One of the big changes we made is rewriting one of the most important rights of our constitution. We changed the right from "You are guilty until proven innocent" to "You are innocent until proven guilty". One giant difference between the two rights is, if you were accused of a crime that you did or did not do you were automatically punished with death in the Salem Witch Trials. If this conspiracy ever happen today it would be addressed very differently. Anyone who was accused of being a witch would need 96% of the juries agreement, to prove them guilty. In the twenty first century, the United States has made many mistakes similar to the Salem Witch Trials. Some of these events caused loss of money, death or faulty impressions. One recent example is the Iraq War. Our past President assumed that Iraq was in the possession of weapons of mass destruction. We did not have conclusive evidence that Iraq had them. We been at war for the past 10 years, only to find out they did not have these weapons. Even though these misunderstandings happened often, they help our country learn from there mistakes.

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