Why I’m against posthumous pardons, even for Alan Turing

Ross Clark is a columnist I try to read because he is never trite. So I was sorry to miss performances of his musical play staged earlier this month. Shot at Dawn is about a sister’s quest for a recognition (after his death) of her brother, Harry Briggs, a soldier in the Great War who was executed for desertion. The play is sympathetic to the idea of posthumous pardon; coupled with this, it’s a lament that society punishes people without trying to understand why they do what they did.

A second theme emerges: homosexuality, and the difficulty (then) of living with this in a world that does not understand. I suppose you could say that Ross’s play is about looking back not in anger but in sympathy.

Here’s a heresy, then. I intend no offence to legions of noble souls for whose posthumous pardons a powerful and moving defence can be made, but there’s an opinion I cannot shake off. I don’t believe in posthumous pardon — no, not even of Alan Turing.

Turing, a mathematician and computing expert, worked during the second world war at Bletchley Park, and his efforts were key to the breaking of the Enigma code, an immense and important achievement. But in 1952 he was convicted of indecency with another man (behaviour which would not be criminal today) and his subsequent history is very sad. To avoid imprisonment he chose chemical castration, and later (according to the accepted account) committed suicide. The affair was a monstrous injustice in everything but the strict legal sense of that word.

But Turing did commit what was, according the law at that time, indecency with another man. His conviction cannot be quashed (as was that of Derek Bentley, hanged for murder a year earlier after being convicted on unsafe evidence), because in Turing’s case due process was followed.