A very late apology to Alan Turing
A petition, a government statement, a very late apology: Britain and Alan Turing, September 2009.
On 10 September 2009, the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown published a statement of a kind that had never existed before. On behalf of the government he apologised to a man who had been dead for fifty-five years. Alan Turing had worked on breaking the German Enigma radio messages during the Second World War and is regarded as one of the fathers of the computer. In the early 1950s he was prosecuted for having had a sexual relationship with a man. In Britain, homosexual acts counted as gross indecency and were a criminal offence. Turing denied nothing. To avoid prison after his conviction, he agreed to hormone treatment, a chemical castration. The intelligence service he had advised until then dropped him as a security risk. On 7 June 1954 he died of cyanide poisoning, a good two weeks before his forty-second birthday.
The apology was prompted by an online petition started by a programmer in the summer of 2009 and signed by around thirty thousand people. Brown called the way Turing had been treated appalling and utterly unfair. What was remarkable was less the regret over the famous individual case than the sentence beside it. The many thousands of other gay men who had been convicted under the same laws had also been treated terribly, and millions more had lived in fear of conviction.
In law, the statement changed nothing at first. The government refused a pardon because Turing had been properly convicted under the law in force at the time. Only in December 2013 did Queen Elizabeth II grant a royal pardon. Later a law followed that also pardoned others convicted under the same provisions and is popularly known by Turing's name. The road there began on a Thursday in September, with a text on a government website.