History Reviews Questions - Case Study Example

1st part 1. An inquisitorial system is a form of a legal system where court is fully involved in doing investigation on the facts of the case, as opposed to an adversarial or accusatory system where the courts role is primarily between the prosecution and the defences. Inquisitorial system conjure up images of the black robbed men (lawyers) who order incarcerations and extract tortuous confessions aimed at extracting the truth. The inquisitorial system believes that the truth can only be discovered in an investigative procedure.

The adversary denotes the participants in a contest between two equal opponents on trial and the trial usually take place under a formal guidance of the court. Witnesses were occasionally involved to provide their accounts voluntarily or under swearing of an oath. The adversarial system rests its faith in the assumptions that partisan advocacy and manipulation of evident materials coupled with equality can put a judge in the position to determine the truth. The type of system is mostly used in countries with legal misdemeanour such as minor traffic offences (Freiberg, P.97) The adoption of inquisitorial justice was connected to the use of terror in the trials in that, some of the individuals were able to twist their cases in courts to warrant for a thorough investigative process.

While the process of investigation was going on to extort the truth, some of the accusers used to commit terror to disrupt the investigative process. 2. Witchcraft was tried in secular courts despite being a spiritual crime; this was perhaps because of the extent of damages it caused in the society. There were beliefs that witchcrafts caused many calamities like sickness, death and other misfortunes. It was these other civil related crimes that made witches be tried in the secular courts (Levack and Brian, P.98)3. According to Cohn, the elites were the people who accepted and spread the news and the existed of magic, witches and demons.

It may be thought that most elites believed in malefic as way of trying to explain some of the happenings that were beyond scientific explanation in the society. To explain or convict the accused of such doing it was, therefore, important for a thorough investigation to be done for evidence, and this brought the rise of an inquisitorial system of justice.2nd part 1. The early official church teaching was that there were no existence of the witches, yet the ancient legal procedures including the inquisition of heretics, mostly the Albigensian and the Waldensians, paved the way for the witch hunt.

These groups of heretics did provoke a response by Christians leading to concerted education efforts and evangelization which later failed, and paved way for the Waldensians to overemphasise on apostolic poverty. Most of them were them persecuted and because of their heretics in the society thus leading to people leaving in fear of witch-hunt (Kors, Alan, and Edward, P.221). 2. Night riding is important to the history of witch-hunt in that, majority of people believed that witchcraft was majorly practiced in the darkness and mostly at night.

It was, therefore, associated to those individuals whose activities were mostly nocturnal leading to continuous suspicion of such individuals in the medieval time, and witch-hunting became rampant and common in the long run. 3. Each social class had a role they played in the outbreak of the witch hunt in that; the elite were the people who pointed fingers to those they suspected in the society as practicing witchcraft. It, therefore, led to more persecution of people depending on the directives given by the elites (Cohn, P.137). 4.

Witchcraft existence in the society needs to be verified, and information should be credible enough to help in accusing those who practice it. Proper legislation is, therefore, essential to avert witch hunt but bring to justice those involved in the cult practice.Work citedCohn, Norman. Europe's Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. PrintFreiberg, A. “Post-Adversarial and Post-Inquisitorial Justice: Transcending Traditional Penological Paradigms.

” European Journal of Criminology 2011: 82–101.Kors, Alan C, and Edward Peters. Witchcraft in Europe, 1100-1700: A Documentary History. Edited by Alan C. Kors and Edward Peters. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1972. Print.Levack, Brian P. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. , 2006: 47-109