I
n August 1799, a century and a quarter after the execution of Benjamin Goad, the Connecticut Superior Court condemned Gideon Washburn of Litchfield to hang for acts of bestiality committed over a five-year period with two cows, two mares, and a heifer. In October Washburn petitioned the legislature for a pardon or a postponement of the execution, which was scheduled to take place on his eighty-third birthday. He protested his innocence but also complained that the jury had violated the Puritan two-witness rule. Of the four witnesses against him, ‘three of them [had testified] each to one fact, and the other to three several facts, that no two witnesses testified of any one fact.’ Washburn’s memory, but not his morals, harkened back to the Puritan era when the biblical twowitness rule had been enforced. But under English common law, which was already beginning to prevail at the time of his birth, one witness became sufficient to convict even a capital offender if the jury found the testimony credible. Washburn’s petition provoked what must have been a furious debate.
So says the study “Things Fearful to Name’: Bestiality in Early America,” John Murrin, Explorations in Early American Culture Pennsylvania History: a Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, vol. 65, 1998), pp. 31.