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Pardon witches, lawmakers told
28/02/2008 21:40 - (SA)
Edinburgh - Lawmakers in Scotland were asked on Thursday to push for a posthumous pardon of everyone found guilty under ancient witchcraft laws, including a spiritualist who was convicted during World War II.
One petition, signed online by 206 people, calls for members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) to urge the executive in Edinburgh to appeal to Britain's interior minister to reconsider a previous refusal to pardon Helen Duncan.
The spiritualist was convicted under the Witchcraft Act 1735 and jailed for nine months in 1944, after a séance in which a dead sailor was said to have disclosed the loss of a British battleship and most of her crew.
The British authorities had kept secret the sinking to maintain morale during World War II and it was not disclosed for several months.
Duncan, who died in 1956, was one of the last people convicted under the act, which was repealed and replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951. Another woman was found guilty in late 1944, although with less publicity.
Duncan's family launched a bid to secure a posthumous pardon in 2006.
The second petition, signed on the Scottish Parliament's website by 69 people, urges lawmakers to push the executive to posthumously pardon everyone convicted in Scotland under witchcraft laws between 1565 and 1736.
Both petitions, proposed by a paranormal group, were handed into the Scottish Parliament Thursday by spiritualist Roberta Gordon, who lives at Gullane, on the coast south-east of Edinburgh.
She said a pardon for Duncan would lift the stigma that her family still bears and an apology was due to those convicted of witchcraft, often on flimsy evidence.
"I feel that in the year 2008 we should be able to say sorry to all of these people who were tortured, strangled and burned," she added.
Supporting research to the second petition said about 4 000 people, most of them women, were accused of being witches, with witch-hunting rife particularly in the region south of Edinburgh.
Torture was often used to extract confessions as late as 1704 and most of those convicted were almost always strangled at the stake and their body burned.
A Scottish Parliament spokesperson told AFP the public petitions committee would consider the documents on March 4 and decide whether to take further action.
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