Maidstone's 1652 Witch Trial Pardon Campaign Featured by US Network CBS News

On 30 July 1652, seven women were hanged at Penenden Heath on the edge of Maidstone, convicted of witchcraft as part of a Kent assizes trial of 32 people that ranged from theft and murder to witchcraft charges. More than 400 years on, the town's campaign to see those convictions formally pardoned has been featured by the American broadcaster CBS News.

Maidstone Borough Council's leader, Stuart Jeffery, wrote to the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, last year asking the Government to introduce legislation pardoning women executed under the 1562 Witchcraft Act, pointing to 2013's Turing's Law - which pardoned men convicted of historic gross indecency offences - as a model. Records show more than 20 women were hanged in Maidstone alone for witchcraft, part of a wider picture in which around 5,000 people, overwhelmingly women, were executed for witchcraft across England and Scotland. The Home Office has said it will respond to the council's letter in due course.

CBS's report centred on two local figures closest to the campaign. Green councillor Claire Kehily, who has led the push locally, took the broadcaster inside a reconstructed prison cell at Maidstone Town Hall - built from an earlier medieval structure where accused witches would have been held before trial - and made the case for a pardon in simple terms: "It matters because it was a miscarriage of justice," she told CBS News. She and fellow councillors are now lobbying the Government, and also plan to petition King Charles III directly.

Samantha Harris, collections manager at Maidstone Museum, showed the broadcaster the museum's own written record of the 1652 trial, and talked through how ordinary misfortune - sick livestock, bad harvests - got pinned on vulnerable women with nobody to vouch for them. "Being single, being independent, these are things that would have been seen as threatening," she said.

Unlike the Salem witch trials in 1690s Massachusetts - whose memory was revived by Arthur Miller's play The Crucible and whose convicted "witches" have all since been formally pardoned - not a single person convicted of witchcraft in the UK has ever been exonerated. Campaigners have been clear the point isn't legal redress, since a pardon would carry no practical effect for people who died centuries ago, but recognition: a petition calling for a permanent memorial to the women on Penenden Heath was presented to the council last year and attracted around 13,000 signatures. Source: CBS News, via Yahoo News and Maidstone Borough Council