{"id":455,"date":"2009-08-24T22:57:00","date_gmt":"2009-08-24T22:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/?p=455"},"modified":"2009-08-24T22:57:00","modified_gmt":"2009-08-24T22:57:00","slug":"mercy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/2009\/08\/24\/mercy\/","title":{"rendered":"mercy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Defending Scots Law & Morality<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I don’t often put rants up about real life events on this blog. It is, after all, meant to be mainly a place for me to keep book reviews as a reminder of what I’ve read over time.<\/p>\n

However the current news storm around the release on compassionate grounds of the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombings has really annoyed the living hell out of me. It’s exercised me to such an extent that I feel the need to put down my thoughts in order to stop going over it in my head.<\/p>\n

Every report has covered the largely ignorant and generally grandstanding criticism of the release by American and British level politicians as if their words were actually germane and relevant to the situation at hand. When most of the time it has been pure political point scoring or hard line spin (bullshit in other words) to make the person\/agency involved to look ‘tough on terrorism’.<\/p>\n

This situation was about the application of Scots Law with regard to compassionate release of prisoners with final stage terminal illnesses. In the last decade 24 out of 31 applications for compassionate release have been granted in Scotland.
\nIn each case the evidence of medical experts, the police and prison governors is taken into account and where the medical evidence is strong enough and the prisoner is not felt to be a danger to society then compassionate release is given.
\nThe seven prisoners who failed upon application for compassionate release in the last decade failed because it was felt that the medical evidence was insignificantly strong.
\nThis is a very strong and compelling precedent.<\/p>\n

Given this precedent Mr Megrahi more than qualified for compassionate release. The only reasons not to have allowed his release would have been to seek to avoid the political storm that we’ve seen over the last few weeks or to treat his crime as being somehow outside the normal system. The first scenario would have been craven cowardice and the second is to make a mockery of the justice system. Either you apply the law consistently to all regardless of crime or you might as well not have a legal system.
\nThe Labour, Tory and Lib Dem leaders in Scotland who have argued against the release have all sullied themselves in my eyes – they are so eager to please Washington, Westminster and the press that they would make an exception of out of a prisoner for political reasons. This chills me – if I were found guilty of a crime most of the politicians in my country would ignore legal precedent as long as it curries favour with the right people. That just strikes me as wrong.<\/p>\n

So here we are – a decision made in concordance with legal precedence based upon the appropriate evidence and the news reports are all about people criticising the decision – almost no reports on the actual fact that this is a feature, not a bug, of Scots Law. This leaves me wanting to defend the decision to the hilt just as ill-informed criticism of the NHS left me wanting to defend that institution to the hilt.<\/p>\n

It makes me want to say hasty and ill considered things about Americans casting stones regarding other nation’s morality and to follow that up with angry and emotive things about American tolerance of horrific legal and moral abuses by certain allies only to turn around and criticize an entirely legal and indeed, as far as I’m concerned, moral decision because of the continuing need to ‘look strong on terror’.
\nAs for the Westminster politicians treating the Scottish Parliament, Scottish Executive, and Scottish Justice system as something that can be treated lightly – that we should bend knee and tug forelock when the big boys down in London and over in Washington say so. Well that’s so objectionable that it makes me want to vote for Independence so that these Bastards never have a say about our system ever again. I say that as someone who is normally happy with the Union.<\/p>\n

I sorry that the situation has been hurtful to some of the families of the victims and disgusted at the Libyan attempts to make political hay out of events but when it comes right down to it you have to apply the law consistently and actually follow through on the morals you claim to have.<\/p>\n

Notice that I have not discussed the soundness of the man’s conviction here -that’s another matter entirely but it’s got nothing to do with why I have gotten so annoyed over the last few days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Defending Scots Law & Morality I don’t often put rants up about real life events on this blog. It is, after all, meant to be mainly a place for me to keep book reviews as a reminder of what I’ve read over time. However the current news storm around the release on compassionate grounds of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-soapbox"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=455"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":456,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455\/revisions\/456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}