Sleuthing school pupils lead effort to pardon wrongly convicted ‘witch’

A memorial at the site in Salem, Massachusetts, where five women were hanged as witches hundreds of years earlier (Stephan Savoia/AP)

More than three centuries after a woman in the US was wrongly convicted of witchcraft and sentenced to death, she is finally on the verge of being exonerated – thanks to a class of curious school pupils.

State senator Diana DiZoglio, a Democrat from Methuen, Massachusetts, has introduced legislation to clear the name of Elizabeth Johnson Jr, who was condemned in 1693 at the height of the Salem Witch Trials but never executed.