New Turing petition calls for criminal pardon

Just change the petition to pardon all people criminally convicted of being gay

@ AC

"Is Genius an excuse to be allowed to break the law with impunity?"

I think the whole point is not that AT should be allowed to break the law, but rather that the law was ridiculouse, petty, barbaric etc. AT highlights the extreme injustice of the law due to the great contribution he made in helping defeat the nasties. His thanks was to be treated in a way that would have been far more compatible with the beliefs of those nasties than our supposed "Free" democracy.

Thanks

Thanks to El Reg for bring this to my attention.

Signed and sent to friends.

Apologising for what other people did in the past?

Useless.

Making sure our children and our peers _never forget_ man's inhumanity to man through the ages?

Priceless.

I won't be signing the e-petition, but I have made sure my kids were exposed to Schindler's List, Roots and Holocaust. And there's a much-thumbed copy of Alan Turing: The Enigma on the bookshelf if they feel up to it.

I wish we wouldn't...

Not withstanding Turin's massive contribution during his short life time nor the tragic circumstances of its ending; I'm not convinced a pardon is the right thing to do.

As awful as the law was at the time, he did break it. He wasn't forced to break the law nor did he do so for noble reasons. Indeed, he was more a victim of the times (the reds under the bed paranoia) than any malicious prosecution... or state persecution. Its also fair to say that the choice of punishment was his as he could have accepted a less barbaric alternative term in prison.

I think the apology was correct and I applaud the changes in the law which will allow men like Turin to strike out their convictions - which actually makes a pardon unnecessary. I think we can best honour Turin if we remember him for his contributions rather than his crime.

Signed it a few weeks ago

at the request of a friend.

Seemed sensible enough at the time but looking back I'd like to have known about the other side of the argument at the time. I don't suppose it'd have stopped me signing but I agree that he should be exonerated rather than pardoned (I hadn't really considered the difference before).

I don't necessarily see a single pardon / exoneration as a bad thing as it makes it far easier for pressure to be brought to bear on the Home Secretary to pardon (etc) everyone else. After all once it is issued for him it makes it very hard not to grant the same to anyone else without his genius.

Thanks for that article - interesting reading.

Definitely tricky

what no-one has considered is that he was convicted of "gross-indecency". Was this charge exclusively leveled at gays, or was it a catch all for unacceptable behaviour of the time? This has implications for the pardon all convicted of this crime argument, as the charge might have been used to prosecute genuinely reprehensible behaviour as well.

Personally I don't think he should be pardoned or exonerated. Not because I think he (and others in the same situation) didn't deserve better, but because it's too late to do anything for him now, and Britain should not shy away from or try to 'tidy up' its history, especially the more shameful parts. What we need to remember is that casual/socially accepted hatred or ignorance destroyed a great man and did untold damage to scientific progress - and this is just the big visible example of the damage done to society.

Acknowledge we were wrong, recognise that the situation is somewhat better but not perfect today, and strive to do better still in the future.

Think it through, please ....

There's a bit more to this than meets the eye.

Yes, of course Turing was brilliant and made a dramatic contribution to the war effort and to computer science.

However, like many other brilliant people, he was a seriously flawed character.

His homosexuality came to light as the result of a break-in to his house conducted by an associate of a homosexual lover who then proceeded to threaten Turing. Turing complained to the police that he was being threatened or blackmailed in relation to the robbery which they were investigating and it's in the course of that police investigation that the nature of his relationship with the lover emerged.

Clearly an individual with such high-level security clearance being blackmailed was a national security risk on a major scale and the fact that he expressed no regret about the situation which he had allowed to take place exacerbated the situation and gave every reason to believe that if he were allowed to continue with security clearance for GCHQ and similar work there could be a repetition of the problem. The outcome of the legal case in relation to the lover of criminal intent was a conditional discharge. In Turing's case, his choice was probation on condition of supervised oestrogen treatment to reduce his libido.

Now, whatever Turing may or may not have been, he wasn't intellectually thick. And it certainly can't have been beyond him to ascertain the probable feminising results of such treatment, both to his body -- development of breasts -- and to his mind.

It's a sad case -- but what to me it illustrates is that a brilliant individual whose mathematical skills made a major contribution to the world in his particular area of expertise behaved in a grossly-ill-advised way with a criminal who was prepared to blackmail him and thereby placed himself in a situation in which there was no practical option to the government of the day but to withdraw his security clearance. The fact that his grossly-bad judgement with regard to the individual with whom he had such an extremely-close relationship was tied in to his homosexuality was what led to the charges against him being on that basis, but consorting with dubious persons of any criminal nature would have led to his security clearance being withdrawn in any case.

Like it or not, no matter how much he'd contributed in the past,Turing was a security risk. Even if his relationship with Murray had not been related to his homosexuality, and if neither of them had been homosexuals, the fact of the matter was that his "friend" had knowingly provided the lead for a criminal associate to burgle Turing and that was the underlying issue.

Turing was brilliant intellectually, but fatally flawed in his judgement with regard to human relationships. How ironic that one who contributed so much to the security of the nation should have behaved in a way that placed that very security at risk and that he should have shown no remorse at so doing!