SIR JOHN DERmOT TURING | 27
up in all sorts of ways. Like John, I am a lawyer by profession, and there is a legal aspect to Alan’s
case which seems, from the perspective of some sixty years later, almost incredible.
Alan Turing was sentenced under the terms of the Criminal Justice Act 1948.^5 This was in
fact quite a progressive piece of legislation: Section 1 abolished penal servitude and hard labour,
and Section 2 abolished whipping, while Section 3 modernized the ability of the sentencing
court to award probation as an alternative to a prison sentence. Until the 1948 Act the courts
had not really been able to attach conditions to probation orders, but the reformed law allowed
the judge to ‘require the offender to comply with such requirements as the court considers
necessary for securing the good conduct of the offender or preventing repetition of the same
offence’.
Rather naively I had imagined that Alan was dealt with under this last section, and I won-
dered whether, when passing the 1948 Act, Parliament had intended that the ‘requirements’
would involve much more than residential conditions or supervision. These days, I suspect that
an involuntary course of hormone injections might be challengeable under the Human Rights
Act,^6 and even in 1952 it might have been unconstitutional under the Bill of Rights 1689.^7
However, I was overlooking Section 4, which gave the court power ‘if it makes a proba-
tion order, to include therein a requirement that the offender shall submit, for such period not
extending beyond twelve months from the date of the order as may be specified therein, to
treatment by or under the direction of a duly qualified medical practitioner’. The reason I had
overlooked this is that this power applied only ‘where the court is satisfied . . . that the mental
condition of an offender is such as requires and as may be susceptible to treatment’, and that
the treatment would be carried out ‘with a view to the improvement of the offender’s mental
condition’.
Alan was not just regarded as a criminal, he was treated as a mental case. A study carried out
at Oxford University’s Department of Criminology looked at 636 cases decided in 1953—not
Alan’s year, but close enough—in which men had been made subject to probation orders with
Section 4 conditions attached.^8 Of these men, sixty-seven had been convicted of homosexual
offences. There is a telling chart that sets out the medical diagnoses in respect of the twenty
offenders whose homosexual offence had been with an ‘adult victim’:
Psychopathic personality, 10
Low intelligence, 2
Schizophrenia, 2
Illness with physical basis, 2
Anxiety states, 1
Ill-defined neurotic illness, 2
Depression, 1
No abnormality, 0It seems that, in 1952, a gay man stood no chance of being thought sane. Even so, Alan’s luck
was out. The Oxford study shows that the treatment was hormonal in only three cases out of 414
where treatment was prescribed under Section 4.
Another consequence of the case was a deterioration in Alan’s relations with the family.
There was no way that social convention would allow for a discussion about Alan’s sexuality at