Confirmed innocent
A pardon and apology to the supposed witches of Scotland would only be the latest righting of a judicial wrong after people have been exonerated years, sometimes generations, after being convicted of often the most heinous crimes.
Henry Ossian Flipper On February 19, 1999, President Bill Clinton granted the first posthumous presidential pardon in US history. The recipient was Lt. Henry Ossian Flipper, the first African-american graduate of West Point and the first African-american commissioned officer in the regular United States Army. Lt. Flipper was dismissed from the Army in 1882 after a court martial, for conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. His court martial and dismissal were long seen as racially motivated.
Myles Joyce was pardoned for a crime he did not commit – nearly 140 years after he was hanged. Joyce was executed in December 1882, along with two other men, for his part in the murder of five members of the same family, despite his co-accused insisting he was innocent. But in 2018, he was granted a posthumous pardon for the Maamtrasna murders by Irish President Michael D Higgins.
Thousands of gay and bisexual men convicted of now abolished sexual offences were posthumously pardoned in 2017. The general pardon is modelled on the 2013 royal pardon granted by the Queen to Alan Turing, the mathematician who broke the German Enigma codes during the Second World War. He took his own life in 1954, at the age of 41, after his conviction for gross indecency.
The Birmingham Six were Irishmen who had been living in the West Midlands city at the time of two city centre pub bombings in 1974, in which 21 people were killed. On March 14, 1991, Hugh Callaghan, Patrick Joseph Hill, Gerard Hunter, Richard Mcilkenny, William Power and John Walker – who, in 1975, were all sentenced to life imprisonment – walked free, after fresh scientific evidence threw “grave doubt” on evidence, according to the appeal judge.
Strike badge
Hundreds of men convicted of offences during the 1984 miners’ strike are to be pardoned by the Scottish Government after an independent review of the divisive dispute. Around 500 Scottish miners were arrested and 200 of those were sacked by the National Coal Board – about 30% of the UK total, even though only 7% of the UK workforce worked at Scottish pits. A Miners’ Strike Pardons
Bill was announced last month.
body of which is headed up by Sebastian Coe. By 2027, World Athletics has made it their mission to ensure their workforce has a 50/50 gender split.
I wish more sports, not to mention other workplaces and education settings, would do the same. If you are the only woman at the table, it is just too easy for the men in the room to talk over you. Or when you are “allowed” to speak, it’s seen as a token gesture, with little or no follow-up actions. We represent
half of the population, so why are we still so underrepresented in so many areas?
It’s heartening to see that things are changing for the better, and I’m sure the increasing diversity of our world leaders is part of the reason for that change.
Who would have thought, 20 years ago, that the vice-president of the United States would be a woman of colour? We are moving in the right direction, but it’s time to pick up the pace – and the mic – so our voices can be heard louder and more often.