Turing family presents petition for pardoning others after "Imitation Game" win

In his acceptance speech for best adapted screenplay at Sunday's Oscars, "The Imitation Game" screenwriter Graham Moore dedicated his win to "that kid out there who feels like she doesn't fit in anywhere."

The film's subject, famed WWII codebreaker Alan Turing, was convicted under the United Kingdom's anti-sodomy laws in 1952, underwent hormonal treatment to avoid prison and died in an apparent suicide two years later.

In 2013, the mathematician who helped break the Nazi's Enigma code was issued an official royal pardon. On Monday, his relatives brought a petition to Prime Minister David Cameron asking for the UK to do the same for the 49,000 other British men persecuted under the law.

"Each of these 49,000 men deserves the justice and acknowledgment from the British government that this intolerant law brought not only unwarranted shame, but horrific physical and mental damage and lost years of wrongful imprisonment to these men," the Change.org petition states. Started in late January by Matthew Breen, editor of LGBT magazine the Advocate, the petition has over 500,000 signatures.

The petition was delivered to 10 Downing Street by Rachel Barnes, Turing's great niece, Nevile Hunt, his great nephew, and Thomas Barnes, his great great nephew.

"It is illogical that my great uncle has been the only one to be pardoned when so many were convicted of the same crime," Barnes told The Guardian. "I feel sure that Alan Turing would have also wanted justice for everybody."

The team that brought Turing's story to the big screen is among those who signed: "The Imitation Game" director Morten Tyldum, Benedict Cumberbatch who played Turing in the film, Keira Knightley who co-starred and Moore, who said in his acceptance speech Sunday that he tried to commit suicide as a teenager.

"Alan Turing never got to stand on a stage like this and look out at all of these disconcertingly attractive faces. And I do," Moore said Sunday. "And that's the most unfair thing I think I've ever heard. So in this brief time here, what I want to use it to do is to say this: When I was 16 years old, I tried to kill myself, because I felt weird and I felt different, and I felt like did not belong. And now I'm standing here, and so I would like this moment to be for that kid who's out there who feels weird or feels different or feels she doesn't fit in anywhere. Yes you do. I promise you do."

The film chronicles Turing's work at Bletchley Park, Britain's World War II codebreaking center, which was credited with shortening the war. His electromechanical machine, a forerunner of modern computers, unraveled the "unbreakable" code used by the Germans. And the film also follows Turing's persecution under Britain's 19th century "gross indecency" law.

For having sex with a man, an illegal act in Britain until 1967, Turing was stripped of his job and chemically castrated with injections of female hormones. He killed himself in 1954 at age 41 with cyanide.

A similar petition started by GLAAD also has over 500,000 signatures.

"'The Imitation Game' has helped millions of people see the harms of anti-gay laws," GLAAD's petition states. "Now, we must honor the memory of Alan Turing and bring justice to the estimated 49,000 other men who, like Turing, were wrongfully criminalized simply because of who they love."