New Haven v. Thomas Hogg: How the Two-Witness Rule Saved a Man's Life

In 1647, a servant named Thomas Hogg stood accused of a capital crime in New Haven Colony. The evidence against him was circumstantial at best—a sow had given birth to piglets that neighbors claimed resembled him. Under the colony’s Biblical law, such a crime carried the death penalty. But Hogg did something that saved his life: he refused to confess.

His case, New Haven v. Thomas Hogg—described by University of Tennessee history professor Charles O. Jackson as “the most interesting buggery case” ever—illustrates a principle that remains vital to criminal justice today. Evidentiary standards exist to protect the innocent, and when those standards are abandoned—or when confessions are coerced—innocent people die.

A Man Already Under Suspicion

Thomas Hogg was not well-liked in New Haven Colony. He had a reputation as a liar and a thief, and was already awaiting trial for theft and dishonesty when the bestiality charges arose. Making matters worse, women of various social positions—including a slavewoman named Lucretia—had reported him for indecent exposure, complaining that he allowed his “filthy nakedness” to show through his breeches.

Hogg had an explanation: he suffered from a painful inguinal hernia that made it difficult to keep himself covered. His neighbors were unpersuaded. In their eyes, he was exactly the sort of person capable of the crime he would soon be accused of.

The Accusation

The trouble began when a neighborhood sow gave birth to two deformed piglets. Hogg’s mistress, Mrs. Lamberton, saw divine judgment in the birth. She told the authorities that one of the “monsters” had “a fair and white skin and head, as Thomas Hogg’s is,” and the other had “a head like a child’s and one eye like him, the bigger on the right side, as if God would describe the party.”

To Mrs. Lamberton and others in the colony, this was no coincidence. It was a sign from God, pointing directly at Hogg.

The Two-Witness Rule

New Haven Colony operated under a legal system that explicitly rejected English common law. Instead, the colony’s founders—Puritans seeking to create a truly Biblical society—derived their legal code directly from Scripture. One requirement they adopted was the “two-witness rule” drawn from Deuteronomy 17:6: “At the mouth of two witnesses, or three witnesses, shall he that is worthy of death be put to death; but at the mouth of one witness he shall not be put to death.”

This rule meant that capital punishment required either two eyewitnesses to the crime or a confession from the accused. Without meeting this threshold, the court could not impose the death penalty—no matter how convinced the community might be of the defendant’s guilt.

Here’s where the case takes a bizarre turn: the colony’s magistrates argued that the piglets themselves could serve as witnesses. Under their reasoning, the offspring’s resemblance to Hogg constituted testimony—the animals were, in effect, pointing their accuser out in court. This gave them one “witness.”

But Governor Theophilus Eaton wanted more evidence. He and his deputy brought Hogg to the barnyard where the crime allegedly occurred and ordered him to scratch the sow under her ear. According to court records, “there appeared a working of lust in the sow, insomuch that she poured out seeds before them.” When Hogg was ordered to scratch another sow, that animal showed no reaction. To the magistrates, the first sow’s response seemed to confirm Hogg’s guilt.

Yet even this strange experiment wasn’t enough. One witness wasn’t enough. The two-witness rule required two. And when Hogg refused to confess—which would have served as the second witness against himself—the court found itself unable to execute him. The frustrated magistrates called him an “impudent liar,” but the piglets’ “testimony” alone couldn’t meet the Biblical standard.

The Tragedy of George Spencer

To understand why Hogg’s refusal to confess was so significant, consider what happened to George Spencer just five years earlier in the same colony.

Spencer was, by all accounts, an outsider. Described as ugly and balding, he had a glass eye that made him instantly recognizable. He had previously been flogged in Boston for receiving stolen goods before moving to New Haven, where he continued to be what authorities called a “habitual troublemaker.” He was openly faithless—never praying, only reading the Bible when his master forced him to.

When a sow gave birth to a malformed, one-eyed piglet in 1642, the Puritans saw divine judgment. Spencer was arrested and charged not only with bestiality but with “prophane, atheistical carriage, in unfaithfulness and stubbornness to his master, a course of notorious lying, filthiness, scoffing at the ordinances, ways and people of God.”

The magistrates told Spencer that “he that confesseth and forsaketh his sins shall finde mercie”—but they never clarified whether this meant mercy from the court or from God. Spencer had recently witnessed a repentant child molester receive only a whipping for his crime. Believing confession might spare his life, Spencer admitted to the act. When he realized this might lead to execution instead, he retracted. He confessed and retracted multiple times, desperately trying to find the path to survival.

The magistrates used his psychology against him. They counted his retracted confessions as one witness and the stillborn piglet as the other—ruling that this met the two-witness requirement. On April 8, 1642, the sow was put to death by sword, and George Spencer was hanged. He was only the second person executed in Connecticut’s history.

In 2015, Superior Court Judge John C. Blue granted Spencer a posthumous pardon, ruling that his confession was coerced and inadmissible, and noting that the alleged crime of fathering a piglet was “biologically impossible.” Judge Blue called Spencer’s case “the first verifiable false confession in American history.”

Hogg’s Fate

Thomas Hogg proved more resilient than Spencer. Despite the community’s conviction of his guilt—and despite his poor standing as a known liar and petty thief—he maintained his innocence. The magistrates had no choice but to acknowledge that the two-witness rule had not been satisfied.

Hogg could not be executed for sodomy. Instead, the court convicted him of his other offenses—lying and stealing—and sentenced him to severe whipping and imprisonment. While incarcerated, he was kept on a “mean diet and hard labor, that his lusts not be fed.”

It was a harsh punishment, but Hogg walked away with his life. He appears again in court records in 1648, admonished for failing to appear for guard duty—a mundane offense that suggests he had resumed something like a normal existence in the colony.

Lessons for Modern Justice

The contrast between Spencer and Hogg carries lessons that resonate today:

Evidentiary standards protect the innocent. The two-witness rule may seem archaic, but its underlying principle—that the state must meet a high burden before taking a life—forms the foundation of modern due process. Today we speak of “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” and require unanimous jury verdicts for capital cases. These standards exist because we recognize that certainty is difficult and the stakes are irreversible.

Coerced confessions produce false confessions. Spencer confessed to a crime that, in all likelihood, he did not commit. Modern research confirms what his case tragically demonstrated: under sufficient pressure, innocent people will confess to crimes they didn’t commit. The Innocence Project reports that about 30% of wrongful convictions overturned by DNA evidence involved false confessions.

Reputation is not evidence. Both Spencer and Hogg were disliked by their neighbors. Both were considered disreputable. The community’s willingness to believe the worst about them made the accusations stick—but being unpopular is not a crime. Today, we recognize this danger in the form of character evidence rules that generally prohibit using a defendant’s reputation to prove they committed a specific act.

Key Takeaways

• The two-witness rule in colonial New Haven required either two eyewitnesses or a confession before imposing the death penalty—an early form of evidentiary protection
• The piglets were counted as one witness—the court accepted that the animals’ resemblance to Hogg constituted testimony, but still needed a second witness
• Thomas Hogg survived by refusing to confess, which would have provided the required second witness against himself
• George Spencer was executed in 1642 after being coerced into confessing to a similar crime; he was posthumously pardoned in 2015
• False confessions remain a major problem—approximately 30% of wrongful convictions overturned by DNA evidence involved coerced or false confessions