At Halloween everybody's thoughts automatically move closer
to matters of the supernatural. It is apt therefore that a new avenue of
progress has opened out in the campaign to pardon Helen Duncan, a Scottish
woman convicted of witchcraft in 1944, one of the last people in Britain to be so
condemned. See links at the bottom for essential background. Activists such as
Margaret Hahn, Helen's granddaughter, hope to use an emerging legal reform to
reopen the ill-fated wartime medium's case. "Turing's Law" is a
nickname for a proposed piece of legislation that allows criminals to be
pardoned when convicted of an offence under a law that is repealed at a later
date. It already exists as a common law precedent following the posthumous
Royal pardon awarded to Alan Turing in 2013, not to mention the official
government apology to him in 2008. Since then thousands of similar lawsuits have begun.
The story of Alan Turing is tragic and shameful. Turing was a brilliant pioneer
of electronics and artificial intelligence who developed a computer that could
decode the famous "ENIGMA" encryption system used by Nazi Germany in
World War II. He should have been treated as a hero, but instead he was jailed
for "gross indecency". His crime was something considered today to be
totally acceptable, even trendy; he was an out-of-the-closet homosexual. He was
freed from prison on condition he received "medical procedures" supposedly
in an attempt to "turn him straight". The treatment ruined his physical
and mental health and he committed suicide in 1954. Thirteen years later in
1967 the "Labouchere Amendment" was repealed and since then Turing's
lifestyle would no longer be considered criminal. Turning was just one of many
thousands of people who were convicted under Labouchere and the other archaic "sodomy
laws", and some are still alive today. The question is, could this same
process apply for the Witchcraft Act of 1735? Why not? The passing of the
Witchcraft Act by Parliament is considered to be a sign of the rise of Enlightenment
thinking in Britain .
Following the ordeals and burnings of the superstitious mediaeval millennium,
it was by the 18th century politically acceptable to suppose that there were no
such things as real witches and therefore what they were doing was a form of
fraud. A line taken by today's skeptic movement. So supposedly in order to
protect the public, the government took action "...whereby ignorant persons are frequently deluded and defrauded;
be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, that if any person shall,
from and after the said twenty-fourth day of June in this year of Our Lord 1735,
pretend to exercise or use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment, or conjuration,
or undertake to tell fortunes, or pretend, from his or her skill or knowledge
in any occult or crafty science..."
Helen Duncan was given a nine
month prison sentence in a modern Britain ,
in a world in which Alan Turing was building computers and you could fly around
the world in an aircraft or sail deep beneath the sea in a submarine and we
were little more than a decade from rockets into space. Yet the text above was
the legal ruling used to prosecute her; written in a Britain
where the horse and cart was the pinnacle of technology and you could be hanged
for urinating off Westminster Bridge
See here for
background: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/programme-144-podcast-margaret-hahn.html.
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