Confusion

There's one of those petitions on the Government's website - you know, the sort if they get 100,000 or more signatures it triggers the possibility of a debate in Parliament.  It was about giving a posthumous pardon to Alan Turing who was convicted of gross indecency with another man back in 1952 and subsequently committed suicide.  I've posted about this before (12/9/09) and perhaps in view of what I said then you won't be surprised that I enthusiastically added my name to the petition.  But then I thought - however much I might despise the way he was treated, how could he possibly be granted a pardon?  Like it or not, he was correctly convicted under the law as it then stood. So it seems to me that the petition is doomed to failure.  Gordon Brown when he was PM offered an apology for the way he was treated, and that is the best we can hope for.  The petition, by the way, currently stands at a little over 31,000 signatures.