The Road to Pardons: Rectifying Historical Injustices
Updated: Sep 22
Scotland has formally apologised to the people accused, convicted, vilified or executed under the Witchcraft Act 1563. It has not, however, enacted the blanket posthumous pardon that campaigners sought. That distinction is the clearest starting point for understanding the “road to pardons” and why the legal position still differs from the moral acknowledgement.
For Paisley, the issue is local as well as national. The Renfrewshire witch hunt of 1697 ended with seven convictions and the deaths of the people now remembered as the Paisley or Bargarran victims. Their case remains one of Scotland’s best-known examples of a prosecution built on beliefs and procedures that would not meet modern standards of evidence or justice.
What happened in the Paisley witch trials of 1697?
The case began after Christian Shaw, a child from Bargarran near Erskine, accused local people of tormenting her through witchcraft. The investigation widened, and a commission tried a group of accused people at Paisley. Seven were found guilty.
Retellings do not always describe the deaths in the same way. The most careful modern summary is that one of the seven, John Reid, died in prison, while the remaining six were executed at Gallow Green on 10 June 1697. The seven convicted people are nevertheless often remembered collectively as the victims of the Paisley witch trial.
The trial was not an isolated curiosity. Scotland’s Witchcraft Act had made witchcraft a capital crime from 1563. The University of Edinburgh’s Survey of Scottish Witchcraft records 3,837 accused people in Scotland, 84 per cent of those whose sex is known being women. The surviving evidence is incomplete, so the number executed cannot be stated with the same certainty.
Why use the language of injustice?
The people prosecuted were treated as if supernatural claims proved criminal acts. Confessions could be produced through coercion, including sleep deprivation, and courts accepted forms of testimony that would now be regarded as profoundly unreliable. Accusation also grew through neighbours naming neighbours and suspects being pressed to identify supposed accomplices.
Calling this an injustice does not require pretending that everyone in the seventeenth century was insincere. Many officials and witnesses believed the ideas on which the prosecutions depended. The injustice lies in what those beliefs allowed institutions to do to vulnerable people without dependable evidence or fair safeguards.
Apology and pardon are not the same thing
An apology acknowledges wrongdoing and expresses responsibility or regret. A pardon is a legal measure directed at convictions. It can declare that people should no longer be treated as guilty under the law that condemned them, even though it cannot undo imprisonment, torture, execution or the damage to families and communities.
A blanket pardon also has limits. Many people were accused but never convicted; others disappeared from incomplete records. Legislation must define who is covered, which statutes and proceedings count, and what legal effect the pardon has. Those technical questions do not erase the moral case, but they explain why an apology and a statutory pardon follow different routes.
Scotland’s formal apology in 2022
On 8 March 2022, International Women’s Day, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon gave a formal posthumous apology on behalf of the Scottish Government to everyone accused, convicted, vilified or executed under the Witchcraft Act 1563. The statement explicitly connected the persecution with historic misogyny while recognising that men were accused too.
The apology was significant because it came from the modern Scottish Government and covered the accused as well as the convicted. It did not itself change the legal status of old convictions.
What happened to the proposed pardon bill?
A proposal for a Witchcraft Convictions (Pardons) (Scotland) Bill was lodged in the Scottish Parliament in June 2022. Its stated aim was to pardon everyone convicted under the 1563 Act. A consultation followed, but the proposal was withdrawn on 19 April 2023 after its sponsoring MSP entered government.
A later public petition, PE2122, again asked the Scottish Parliament to urge the Government to pardon those accused and convicted. The petition closed in January 2025. As of September 2026, the Scottish Parliament’s records show no blanket statutory pardon in force. Scotland therefore has a national apology, active remembrance and continuing debate, but not the proposed legal pardon.
What would a pardon achieve now?
No posthumous measure can restore a life. Supporters of a pardon argue that it would correct the state’s formal language of guilt, honour the people prosecuted and make Scotland’s rejection of those proceedings unmistakable. It could also support education about the ways fear, misogyny, poverty, disability, social conflict and institutional power shaped accusation.
The value is chiefly public and symbolic, but “symbolic” does not mean trivial. Laws and official records help determine how later generations name the past. A pardon would be one form of official remembrance alongside memorials, historical research, teaching and careful use of victims’ names.
Remembering the Paisley victims responsibly
Local remembrance is strongest when it avoids turning suffering into supernatural entertainment. The accused were people, not costume figures or proof of a curse. Good history distinguishes documented evidence from folklore, acknowledges uncertainty and avoids repeating lurid claims simply because they are memorable.
Paisley’s memorial activity, research and public storytelling place the 1697 case within a wider history of injustice. That work matters whether or not new pardon legislation is introduced. The phrase associated with the Paisley memorial—“Pain inflicted, suffering endured, injustice done”—captures the purpose more accurately than stories about witches or magic.
Why this local history appears on Paisley Honey
Paisley Honey is a small maker-led business based in Paisley, and this journal includes the religious, social and natural history of the place in which the work is made. The article contains no product recommendation: attaching an unrelated sales block to a story about people executed after an unjust trial would add no value. More about the business and its connection with the town is available on the About Paisley Honey page.
Questions people ask about Scotland’s witch-trial pardons
Have the Paisley witch-trial victims been pardoned?
No blanket statutory pardon has been enacted in Scotland. They are included in the Scottish Government’s 2022 formal apology and in local acts of remembrance.
How many people were executed after the Paisley trial?
Seven people were convicted. One died in prison and six were executed at Gallow Green in June 1697, although shorter retellings sometimes refer collectively to seven executed victims.
Why pardon convictions under a law that no longer exists?
The purpose would be to reject the old legal judgment officially and to recognise the people convicted as victims of injustice. It would be retrospective and symbolic rather than a modern retrial.
Was everyone accused of witchcraft in Scotland a woman?
No. Most were women, but men were accused too. The University of Edinburgh survey records women as 84 per cent of accused people whose sex is known.
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