Dorothy Talbye trial

The Dorothy Talbye Trial (d. 1638) is an early American example of execution of a mentally-ill woman for murder, at a time when people with severe mental illness were treated no differently from ordinary criminals. Talbye was hanged in 1639 for killing her three-year-old daughter. She claimed that God told her to do so.^[1] Although Puritan Governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony considered Talbye to be possessed by Satan, the penalty for murder was necessarily death.^[2]

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