Alan Turing law: Gay, unjustly convicted - and now denied a pardon
"It just confirmed all my fears about so-called British justice," he says."The attitude was they were two upstanding police officers protecting society from people like me."
As many as 15,000 gay men were said to be eligible when the law was passed, inspired by the posthumous pardon of World War Two code-breaker Alan Turing, who killed himself after being convicted of gross indecency. The convictions eligible for disregard and pardon are gross indecency and buggery under the 1956 Sexual Offences Act, equivalent military offences and similar offences under earlier legislation.
She says:"People have lost livelihoods and careers because of an offence that should never have been a crime in the first place."Thousands of gay men are living with this conviction but the home secretary has the power to"put this right" by extending the system to more offences, Ms Watts says. Home Office figures show the reason most applications were rejected was that they related to offences not connected with sexuality - such as possession of drugs.
The full offence in the 1956 Sexual Offences Act is"soliciting and importuning", and soliciting remains a crime, he said. Today, it only applies to people seeking the services of sex workers on the street, however.Some gay men say unfair criminal records still have the power to blight their lives, even in recent years. Richard - not his real name - was arrested in the mid-1990s for importuning, after a man briefly spoke to him as he left a West End gay club.
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