The Salem Witch Trials

https://youtu.be/NVd8kuufBhM source 

The witch trials were held for people who were convicted of witchcraft, in Salem Massecutsets from February 1692 and May 1693.

if you confess and ask for forgiveness you may be able to walk free without getting publicly hanged.

They were the cause of paranoia and superstitions and a justice system that valued repentance over truth.

People feared starvation and disease, and to make things worse 1692 brought the coldest winters on record, that winter two cousins 9year old Better Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Wiliams, behaved strangely, a physician found nothing wrong, but diagnosed the girls and "under an evil hand".

Puritans  (people who were protestants) believed that the devil wreaked mayhem in the world by controlling humans, or witches. As the "symptoms" began to spread, 12 girls were found, 4 of them accused three local women of tormenting them, and on February 29th authorizes they arrested Sarah Good which was a Pregnant mother, Sarah Osbourne who was very absent from church, Tituba an enslaved woman In Betty Parri's home known only by her first name.

Tituba denied the accusations, but after a while, she confessed to practicing witchcraft by the "devil's orders", and said that Sarah good and Sarah Osbourne had forced her.

Osbourne died in prison, while Good was turned on in court by her own husband, saying that "she was a which ore would turn to be one very quickly". Good gave birth in jail, her baby died and she got hung shortly after, Tituba was held in custody, then released.

They made false confessions to save themselves from getting hung, one of the authorities told one of the 4 that "if you don't confess we will hang you, but if you do we can let you go."

The court accepted all types of evidence, as well as dubious evidence, (meaning that the accused would twitch and rave when "touched" by invisible ghosts).

Those who dared to speak out such as Jude Nathanial Saltonstall came under suspicion.

by the spring of 1893 over 100 people had been imprisoned, 14 women and 6 men hung after while accusations went outside of Salem, only after the Governor of Massachusetts colony's wife was accused, then he suspended the trials. Sentences were amended, prisoners released and arrests stopped. 

The reason is still unknown to this day, but what we do know is that adults accepted "evidence" from children as hard evidence.