A posthumous pardon is a form of symbolic redemption; a way of trying to right a wrong and redeem a reputation that had been tarnished for a long time. By definition, the person it is intended for is already dead, and that does prompt a discussion over the true merits of such a pardon. Some feel it is a waste of time and resources, others believe it remains necessary, even if it is overdue.

We’re not here to debate any of that. Instead, we are going to look at ten famous cases where historical figures received pardons decades, centuries, and, in some cases, even millennia after their deaths.

10. Cicero

Back in 63 BC, a group of angry politicians, soldiers, and farmers led by Lucius Sergius Catilina (better known simply as Catiline) tried to stage a coup on the Roman Republic and overthrow by force the two ruling consuls, Cicero and Gaius Antonius Hybrida. Their plan didn’t work. The Catiline Conspiracy, as it was known, was exposed by Cicero, causing Catiline to flee Rome and later be defeated by Antonius at the Battle of Pistoria. 

Meanwhile, back in Rome, Cicero exposed several other co-conspirators and had them executed without trial. For 2,000 years, this has been a blemish on the record of the famed orator and statesman, who has been accused of murder after embellishing the threat to the state posed by the conspirators to advance his own career. But now, after all this time, Cicero has been cleared of any wrongdoing in a trial held at the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.

Of course, this wasn’t legit, but rather a mock trial organized by the charity Classics for All. Cicero’s defense was provided by King’s Counsel Ali Bajwa while the jury was comprised of 50 of his peers, all of them history buffs. The barrister noted at the outset of the trial the lengthy delay in bringing the case to court. He argued that the attempted coup brought the Roman Republic into a state of war and that Cicero acted lawfully as a head of state during such a time by purging the government of enemies within who were guilty of treason. The jury voted in Cicero’s favor by a vote of 28-22 and the Roman statesman was cleared of all charges.

9. Lenny Bruce

American comedian Lenny Bruce said a lot of things that upset and offended people. It was kind of his thing. Eventually, this started getting him into trouble with the law, as Bruce was arrested several times on obscenity charges during the 1960s. In all cases, he was either acquitted or had the charges dropped, but not in New York. 

After performing in April 1964 at the Cafe Au Go Go, he was, once again, arrested for obscenity and, this time, he was prosecuted and found guilty following a highly-publicized six-month trial. Lenny Bruce was released on bail during his appeal but died of a drug overdose before it was decided on August 3, 1966.

Almost 40 years later, Bruce was cleared of any wrongdoing when he received the first posthumous pardon in New York State history courtesy of Governor George Pataki. The campaign to clear the comedian’s good and smutty name was spearheaded by his daughter and ex-wife, multiple prominent First Amendment activists, as well as entertainers such as Robin Williams, Penn & Teller, and the Smothers Brothers. 

8. Henry Ossian Flipper

Henry Ossian Flipper made history in 1877 when he became the first Black American to graduate from the United States Military Academy at West Point. He then earned a commission as a second lieutenant with the US Cavalry, joining one of the Buffalo Soldier regiments. After serving in the Apache Wars, Flipper was transferred to Fort Davis where he became the new quartermaster. 

During his time there, some money went missing from the safe and Flipper was arrested and charged with embezzling. A court-martial in 1881 found him innocent of the main charge, but guilty of a secondary one which had been added during the trial – conduct unbecoming of an officer. For this, Flipper received a dishonorable discharge in 1882. 

Ever since then, there has always been talk that the actions that led to the lieutenant’s dismissal were racially motivated. An Army review conducted at a later date indicated the same thing. Rumors suggested that Flipper might even have been set up by his commanding officer. 

It took a long time, but Flipper eventually found justice. In 1976, the Army exonerated him and changed his dismissal to an honorable discharge. Then finally, in 1999, President Clinton gave him a full pardon and restored his good name.

7. Susan B. Anthony

President Trump also offered a full posthumous pardon to a person in a similar situation – 19th-century women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony who campaigned tirelessly to grant women the right to vote. 

Back in 1873, she was the defendant in a trial that caused a bit of a brouhaha in the country after being arrested for voting illegally in the 1872 presidential elections. She wasn’t the only one who did this; fourteen other women from the same ward voted but none of them had the high profile of Anthony so the government didn’t bother taking them to trial. 

The judge in the case, Supreme Court Justice Ward Hunt, already had an obvious negative view of women’s suffrage. He didn’t allow Anthony to speak until after the verdict and even directed the jury to find her guilty. The punishment wasn’t severe – a $100 fine – but Anthony still proudly announced in the courtroom that she would not pay a single cent. She knew what she was doing – she wanted to take her case all the way to the Supreme Court. The judge knew this, too, so he declared that Anthony would not be jailed for refusing to pay the fine, and the court took no further action.

6. Oscar Wilde

Nowadays, Oscar Wilde is hailed as one of the greatest writers of the English language, but people did not always have such a positive opinion of him. In fact, following a highly-publicized trial, Wilde was convicted of homosexual acts and did two years of hard labor that left him a weakened shell of his former self and brought on his death a short while later.

This drama started unexpectedly – with Wilde serving as the accuser, not the defendant. In 1895, the Marquess of Queensberry publicly denounced the playwright as a “posing sodomite” because he was having a secret liaison with the Marquess’s son, Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde decided to take him to court for criminal libel, but this turned out to be a terrible move because the nobleman produced evidence that he was telling the truth. The case against the Marquess was dropped and Wilde was then arrested for sodomy and gross indecency. He was found guilty and given the maximum sentence of two years of labor which left him frail and sickly. After being released, Wilde moved to France and died of meningitis three years later, although what caused the illness is still a matter of debate.

In 2017, Oscar Wilde and tens of thousands of other men in similar situations all received posthumous pardons after Turing’s Law went into effect, named after World War II codebreaker Alan Turing. But more on him later.

5. Jack Johnson

In 1908, boxer Jack Johnson pissed off a lot of racist white people when he became the first black world heavyweight champion in history. He pissed them off even further in 1910, after winning a match dubbed the “Fight of the Century.” His opponent was James Jeffries, a previously undefeated fighter who was billed as the “Great White Hope” and came out of retirement just to take the title away from the black boxer. When Johnson defeated Jeffries, race riots erupted in at least a dozen cities across the country.

The city of Chicago got its chance to take revenge on Johnson in 1912, only a few months after the boxer opened a swanky, desegrated nightclub named Cafe de Champion. A white woman from Minneapolis complained to the police that her daughter, who worked at the club, was in a relationship with Johnson after he somehow abducted her. The City Council passed a resolution to revoke the club’s liquor license, music was prevented from playing on the premises and Johnson wasn’t even allowed inside the building anymore. 

Still, the city wanted even more, so when another white woman admitted that she, too, had an affair with the boxer and that the couple traveled across state lines, Johnson was arrested for violating the Mann Act which pertained to “white slave traffic.” He was found guilty and fled to Europe before eventually returning and serving his sentence. There was no doubt that the targeting of the boxer was racially motivated, so after a passionate campaign spearheaded by actor and boxing enthusiast Sylvester Stallone, Jack Johnson received a full pardon from President Trump in 2018.

4. Robert E. Lee

Following the Civil War, President Lincoln issued a general amnesty to the Confederates as long as they accepted the abolition of slavery and subscribed to an oath to “henceforth faithfully support, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Union of States thereunder.” There were a few exceptions, though, including officers who held and resigned Army and Navy commissions in order to join the South. They could still receive clemency, they just needed to apply directly. 

General Robert E. Lee, the man who led the Confederate Army, was among them. He accepted the oath and filed the petition but, somehow, the paperwork slipped through the cracks. Secretary of State William Seward usually gets the blame. As a final “screw you” to Lee, he received his petition and gave it to a friend as a souvenir, while instructing his underlings to “lose” the oath somewhere in the State Department records. A few years later, Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, issued a second amnesty which removed those exceptions. For whatever reason, Lee never followed up on his petition and he died in 1870, technically, stateless.

Fast-forward an entire century and an archivist going through old records found the general’s lost-lost oath inside the National Archives. After five more years of tedious bureaucracy, President Gerald Ford signed the congressional resolution on August 5, 1975, which granted Robert E. Lee a pardon and restored his full citizenship.

3. The Groveland Four

A particularly dark chapter in Florida’s history was the Groveland Four case. In 1949, four Black teenagers stood accused of raping a white woman and assaulting her husband in Groveland, Lake County, Florida. One of them, Ernest Thomas, went on the run and was caught by an angry mob and shot over 400 times. Another one, Samuel Shepherd, was killed by a sheriff after claiming that he tried to escape. The other two, Walter Irvin and Charles Greenlee, confessed after torture and were both found guilty and sent to prison. Irvin was paroled in 1968 and was found dead in his car a year later, while Greenlee became the only one able to put the whole ordeal behind him. He was paroled in 1962 and moved to Tennessee with his family, passing away in 2012.

Even during the 1950s, the Supreme Court ruled that the four men did not receive a fair trial. By the time the second trial came around, only two of them were still alive, and even if they were represented by future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, they were still found guilty by an all-white jury.

It wasn’t until half a century later that the state of Florida recognized the injustice done to them. In 2019, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis issued a posthumous pardon to the Groveland Four, and two years later, a judge exonerated them of all charges.

2. Alexander the Great

Alexander the Great faced a similar trial to the aforementioned Cicero. And by similar, we mean identical. It was the same kind of mock trial organized by the charity Classics for All, just in a different year. As before, the trial took place at the UK Supreme Court, where the Macedonian king stood accused of war crimes during the burning of Persepolis. His defense was provided by King’s Counsel Patrick Gibbs, while King’s Counsel Philippe Sands served as prosecutor and Lord Leggatt, Justice of the Supreme Court, presided over the trial.

There was no debate over whether Alexander was responsible for the city’s destruction or not. We know he was. It was just a matter of the motivation behind it. The prosecution claimed that it was a deliberate political act, while the defense argued that it was merely a tragedy resulting from drunken behavior. We’ve all been there. Unfortunate, sure, but not a war crime. 

In the end, the mighty conqueror walked out of the courtroom a free man, having been acquitted on all four counts of war crimes.

1. Alan Turing

Alan Turing was an English mathematician, computer scientist, and cryptanalyst. He was one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence and computer science and, as a codebreaker, was instrumental during World War II by helping the Allies crack coded messages from the Axis powers. Nowadays, there are like a bajillion things named after him, he’s on the £50 note, and he regularly features among the first in polls of greatest Britons who ever lived. 

Unfortunately, in his own time, Turing wasn’t as appreciated for one reason – he was gay. In 1952, he was charged with “gross indecency” and pled guilty. To avoid prison, he accepted a hormonal treatment to reduce his libido, a process we now call chemical castration. Less than two years later, Turing committed suicide by cyanide poisoning, although some believe his death might have been accidental.

In 2009, the British government issued an apology for how Turing was treated, with Prime Minister Gordon Brown writing that he “deserved so much better.” Still, it wasn’t a pardon. In fact, a pardon was denied by then Justice Minister Lord McNally, reasoning that Turing was correctly convicted based on the laws at the time. Eventually, the queen stepped in and used a special exception known as the royal prerogative of mercy to grant a pardon to the computer scientist. Not only that, but in 2016 the UK passed the Alan Turing Law which granted retroactive pardons to all men who had been convicted for homosexual acts in the past, including the aforementioned Oscar Wilde.

Posthumous albums are one of pop culture’s most enduring mysteries. With the artist gone but not forgotten, we’ll never know whether these packages are something that they would’ve approved, whether they’re something they planned, or whether they’re cynically cribbed together by faceless record execs. The mystery leaves these albums with a mixed legacy, but sometimes, it’s just nice to hear the voices of the departed one more time.

However, one thing is certain: there is always a demand for them.

Related: 10 Eerie Quotes From Musicians Who Died Before 30

10 Lioness: Hidden Treasures (2011)–Amy Winehouse

For fans, there’s a pain to seeing their favorite stars deteriorate. It wasn’t long after she became an international star with her mainstream breakthrough album Back to Black that Amy Winehouse’s struggles with addiction became tabloid fodder. Fans hoped that new material from her would turn her public image back toward that of a talented musician and away from being a public spectacle. But those hopes were dashed when producer Mark Ronson admitted in 2008 that she simply wasn’t in any state to record new music. Also, sessions for a theme song for the Bond film Quantum of Solace had been abandoned without Winehouse recording her vocals.

But when stars pass, fans seem to be able to remember the best version of them. The version of Winehouse, who heartbreakingly deteriorated before our eyes, was gone and replaced by a sad-eyed chanteuse with show-stopping talent. So, of course, an album followed. Happily, the album was compiled by producers who worked with her, Ronson and Salaam Remi, and her family. But sadly, due to her inability to record before she passed, the tracks mostly came from sessions that predated her debut, Frank, when she was still finding her feet as a musician. As an album, it lacked the flair of Back to Black, making that gem, sadly, her sole hit album.^[1]

9 Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk (1998)–Jeff Buckley

Listening to Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, one has to make peace with the fact that we know categorically that Jeff Buckley did not want these songs to see the light of day. The recording process for the album, intended as a follow-up to 1994’s cult hit Grace, was torturous, and Buckley discarded the recordings, planning to start over.

A handful of tracks was all he had produced when he died a death as beguiling and poetic as his songs. Buckley had decided to take a dip in Mississippi’s Wolf River, wearing Doc Martens, reportedly while singing Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” Unfortunately, he was caught in the wake of a passing river barge and disappeared.

His estate passed to his mother, who did what she could to preserve his wishes when she learned that Sony intended to release the songs from the initial recording sessions that Buckley had scrapped. The compromise she reached with the corporate giants was a second disc that included those demos from just before his passing. It wasn’t a great compromise, but I think the world is richer for having one more Jeff Buckley album in it. Even if it must be regarded more as a document of his creative processes than as an artistic statement. More diary than autobiography.^[2]

8 An American Prayer (1978)–The Doors

Believe it or not, The Doors released three albums after Jim Morisson passed away. But only one of them featured the late lead singer. The 1978 album An American Prayer was made up of recordings of Jim Morisson reading his poetry, set to music by the band.

Reviews were mixed, with many speculating on whether Morrison would’ve approved of the project. Longtime Doors producer Paul Rothschild called it the rape of Jim Morrison and likened it to “taking a Picasso and cutting it into postage-stamp-sized pieces and spreading it across a Supermarket wall.” While John Haeny, the engineer who made the original recordings with Morrison, said that “I want people to understand that this album was made by those people who were closest to Jim, both personally and artistically. Everyone had the best intentions.” He believed Morrison would be pleased and would have “understood our motivation and appreciated our dedication and heartfelt handling of his work.”^[3]

7 Made in Heaven (1995)–Queen

At least with Made in Heaven, we know that Freddy Mercury actively wanted a posthumous album to be made. Knowing that his demise was imminent, Freddy Mercury recorded as much as possible. Brian May said at the time that after discussing what was going to happen, they knew the band was on borrowed time. They recorded as often as Mercury felt well enough, adding, “We basically lived in the studio for a while, and when he would call and say, ‘I can come in for a few hours,’ our plan was to just make as much use of him as we could.” Mercury told the band he would sing whatever they gave him, finishing with “I will leave you as much as I possibly can.”

Producer David Richards noted that Mercury usually waited for songs to be completed before adding final vocals, but he knew he would not get that chance here. Unfortunately, the band still found that they had less than an album’s worth of material to work with, so they turned to old demos and vocals from Mercury’s solo albums. Made in Heaven came out something of a bittersweet patchwork of an album.^[4]

6 Michael (2010) and Xscape (2014)–Michael Jackson

Given Michael Jackson’s reclusiveness and retreat from the music scene before his death, a follow-up to his last album, 2001’s Invincible, seemed a distant possibility. However, almost immediately after his death, Jackson’s estate signed a $250 million deal with Epic Records to release ten “lost” Michael Jackson albums. Hence: 2010’s Michael. Michael was marred, however, by allegations from Jackson’s family, fans, and producer Will.i.am. that three of the songs did not involve Michael Jackson at all. Instead, claiming they featured the voice of impersonator Jason Malachi. Malachi even admitted as such on Facebook; but retracted that statement on Myspace, claiming that his Facebook page had been hacked.

The matter came to a head with a class-action lawsuit against Sony Music. The record label argued that the first amendment gave them the right to attribute songs to an artist, even when that attribution was not accurate.

After that, it’s no wonder that only one other “lost” Michael Jackson album has surfaced. In 2014, Xscape played it safe, featuring only eight tracks, each of which had well-documented provenance, each having been recorded for a previous album but not making the cut.^[5]

5 Toy (2021)–David Bowie

The one possible silver lining to Bowie’s death in 2016 was seeing the global collective outpouring of grief. I am a massive Bowie fan, but I would’ve thought that his passing would’ve gone down as just another celebrity death in the media—simply forgotten in a day. But instead, the collective mourning was a mass expression of global unity.

The album he’d released two days before his death, Blackstar, had reached number one in 27 countries, so whoever was in charge of these things would’ve been tempted to go back to that well as soon as possible. EPs, box sets, and live albums came thick and fast, but a full-length unreleased album took five years. Toy was recorded in 2001 and had leaked onto the Internet in 2011, so fans were already intimately familiar with it. But still, it was nice to hear it sumptuously remastered and lovingly packaged by producer Tony Visconti and the other musicians who worked on it.

Though it remains a mystery why it wasn’t released back in 2001. Bowie blamed a record label stoush, but why it wasn’t released after that was resolved remains unanswered.^[6]

4 Tupac’s Numerous Posthumous Releases

Specifically, these include The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory (1996), R U Still Down? (Remember Me) (1997), Still I Rise (1999), Until the End of Time (2001), Better Dayz (2002), Loyal to the Game (2004), and Pac’s Life (2006).

With a discography that features seven posthumous albums vs. five regular ones, Tupac Shakur must have some sort of record. The Don Killuminati was recorded a month before his death and released two months after, while Pac’s Life was timed to coincide with the tenth anniversary of his death. The decade in between saw so many new releases that they fueled conspiracy theories that Tupac was still alive.

The explanation was a little more mundane… Tupac was a workaholic. Anecdotes about his work ethic are famous. The Don Killuminati was Tupac’s second album of 1996, and he also acted in three films that year. Labelmate Snoop Dogg said that Pac was laying down tracks at a rate of one every twenty minutes or so, adding ominously, “To me, it was like, why is he working so fast and so hard and trying to finish these records up? He had to know [he would die soon].”^[7]

3 Milk and Honey (1984)–John Lennon and Yoko Ono

Completing Milk and Honey was a passion project by Yoko Ono. And unlike the other albums on this list, it did not intend to create the illusion that Lennon was still around making music. Designed as a follow-up to the pair’s previous album, 1980’s Double Fantasy, the project was shelved after Lennon’s death, and it wasn’t until 1983 that Yoko was able to resume working on it.

The album alternates between songs by Lennon and songs by Ono. Hers are polished, commercial, and contemporary, while Lennon’s are casual and a bit rough, preserved just as he left them. A testament to his absence.^[8]

2 Brainwashed (2002)–George Harrison

Brainwashed was in some stage of development for almost fifteen years. But when Harrison was stabbed by a mentally ill home intruder in 1999, parallels to bandmate John Lennon’s murder must have deeply shaken the former Beatle. Contemporary reports suggested that his attacker had an irrational obsession with the Beatles, much like John Lennon’s killer Mark David Chapman.

Having already survived an aggressive throat cancer, Harrison focused on completing the album and shared every detail with his son Dhani Harrison and producer Jeff Lynn. That information proved incredibly useful to the younger Harrison and Lynn when Harrison’s cancer returned in 2001. So much so that they were able to follow the exact timetable laid out by Harrison, completing Brainwashed using the same studio sessions that Harrison had already booked.^[9]

1 American V: A Hundred Highways (2006) and American VI: Ain’t No Grave (2010)–Johnny Cash

The partnership between Johnny Cash and hip hop producer and Def Jam founder Rick Rubin was such a lucrative one that there may have been more demand for a new collaboration than for a new Johnny Cash album. The American Recordings series, produced by Rubin, gave the world such beloved tracks as Cash’s covers of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” Soundgarden’s “Rusty Cage,” and Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus.” They revitalized Cash’s career, exposing him to a new audience.

Rubin is known for his perfectionism. On earlier albums in the series, that trait provided a dynamic counterbalance to Cash’s rough and raw sound. But on American V and VI, Cash’s voice was too frequently a pained rasp that even Rubin’s production chops could not make up for. On American V, this made for an evocative portrait of weariness, but on American VI, it just made for a difficult listen. The Los Angeles Times called it Cash’s hospice record in a review that seemed to miss how sad that was.

Both Rick Rubin and Cash’s son John Carter Cash have said that more recordings were made during those sessions, promising more entries in the American Recordings series to come.^[10]