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Lockerbie bomber released on compassionate grounds
BillieTheBot
Posts: 8,721 Bot
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/south_of_scotland/8197370.stm
I'd imagine this will divide people up pretty sharply.
Even if the man was guilty (which he isn't) I would still have approved of this. He's not long for the world anyway.
I should imagine some will disagree though.
I'd imagine this will divide people up pretty sharply.
Even if the man was guilty (which he isn't) I would still have approved of this. He's not long for the world anyway.
I should imagine some will disagree though.
Beep boop. I'm a bot.
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There is lots of information on the net but have a read through this for starters :
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/hugh-miles-lockerbie-was-it-iran-syria-all-i-know-is-it-wasnt-the-man-in-prison-1206086.html
Ten years inside isn't much for 260+ lives, but as Aladdin rightly points out he's not long for this world and its pretty likely he didnt actually do the crime anyway.
murder; conspiracy to murder; and, a breach of the Aviation Security Act 1982 I believe.
He was convicted of 270 cases of murder.
If you murder someone you should be killed. Instead he has lived off taxpayers money and now made an absolute mochary of the justice system. Why should a murderer be treated like a human and given compassion? :banghead:
I'm embarassed to be British right now. The Americans have got it right, over there you commit a crime you get punished, this is an absolute disgrace.
You cant have it both ways, either he says in prison and keeps wasting tax payers money, or we send him back to libya where hes going to going to die anyway, we'd be wasting tax payers money for the next couple of months when he dies in one of our prisons, where our system is probably paying for his cancer treatment/painkillers etc
Also even if i lost people i think i'd rather have someone convicted who was without a doubt guilty, rather than just bunging someone in prison, just to have someone in prison for it
I don't think the death penalty should be used just as a deterant though, it should be used to stop law abiding, hard working citizens having to pay to house and feed murderers.
Yeah I take your point about can't have it both ways, and yeah I would rather know the person convicted definately commited the crime but perhaps the victims families do believe it was him, the majority no doubt will, so it is really not fair when people are doubting he his guilty.
And the fact remains there are extremely serious doubts about the conviction. Put it this way: even if the man had done it after all, he should still never have been convicted on the basis of completely unreliable witnesses and evidence that should have never been admitted.
As for who actually did it, everything points out to a Palestinian group acting on behalf of Iran, who had seen the US mistakenly shoot down an Iranian Airbus the previous year killing hundreds. However it was not politically convenient to blame Iran at the time, but certainly was to to blame Lybia.
There are lots of arguments for having a death penalty. However this one is a completely incorrect assumption.
In the USA it costs more to execute someone than it does to leave them in prison until they die.
As for the Lockerbie guy, if he was guilty beyond all doubt then he should have been left to rot in prison. He isn't guilty beyond all doubt, and he's going to die anyway.
One of the strongest advocates of his innocence was actually a parent of one of the victims anyway.
Megrahi has just released a statment about his release. Here's an extract:
.
The full statement is compelling and moving: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/8212910.stm
I don't know whether he's guilty or not (though a trial and appeal found him so). But assuming he is he should have rotted in jail until he died, this was the biggest mass murder on british soil ever, not something that should be forgiven and forgotten about...
What I find interesting is the discrepancy in policy. Perhaps in Scotland things are different, but you couldn't really see the likes of Myra Hindley or Ian Brady having been released because they were about to die.
I personally don't have a problem with somebody who is about to die to be released on compassionate grounds if they're no longer a danger to others.
Regarding whether the man might have been innocent or guilty, I won't bore you with the full details with suffice to say that the only evidence with which he was convicted was the testimony of a single, highly unreliable witness fromn Malta who reckoned saw him in his shop buying some clothes which were allegedly found in the suitcase where the bomb was. The witness omitted to say he had seen images of the man prior to the trial. In all it was a sick joke, and would have been thrown out of any normal court in the civilised world (by normal I mean one that was free of massive political interference).
So I sat outside listening to the report, drinking a nice cup of tea. I heard that this decision was made by some Scottish minister called Kenny MacAskill. Not a UK matter, it seems. I almost spat out my tea in shock when he said: "Mr al-Megrahi did not show his victims any comfort or compassion. They were not allowed to return to the bosom of their families to see out their lives, let alone their dying days. No compassion was shown by him to them. But that alone is not a reason for us to deny compassion to him and his family in his final days."
Sorry, but what the fuck? This cunt (for there is no other word for someone who was responsible for killing 270 people) has committed a heinous crime against humanity. As for this claim that he's innocent, that he's actually a fluffy little bunny who hasn't done anything wrong in his life, don't make me laugh. If you have evidence of his innocence, produce it. As far as I'm concerned, he should be thrown back into prison and left to die. To hell with him.
P.S. You know things are fucked up when I agree with Tom Harris on something. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Are you aware of the "evidence" on which this man was convicted, SG?
You'd get a fairer trial in a corrupt banana Republic than he did. The conviction was a disgrace.
How does that work?
I've had a look online and yes, the facts do seem to indicate what you say. :thumb:
Its costs around $90 000 more per year to keep an inmate on death row .. although they do keep condemned people on death row for a stupid amount of time before the execution is carried out.
It obviously does not need to, but the prison industry is not complaining.
I think it's the additional legal costs that are the issue here. Obviously the safeguards for the death sentence have to be that much higher than for life imprisonment, so it takes a long time to go from sentencing to actually carrying it out.
Anyway, I'll just echo what others have said. From what I can tell, the conviction was utter bullshit and he was used as a convenient scapegoat for the incident. But that's what the appeal courts are for. If someone is found guilty of a murder of this type, he shouldn't be let out on compassionate grounds. There's a hospital in prison if you're sick. A convenient conviction and a convenient reason for release without having to admit to the BS conviction, by the looks of it.
I agree with you, and I agree with Rev Ian Galloway:
In some ways the reactions remind me of when Michael Portillo went to the states to learn about the most humane way to kill a human, believing that the reason for the death sentence was about removing a dangerous individual from society. The closing scenes of the documentary were of him interviewing someone a prison governer, who said that a humane way to kill a human would be horrendous. Because he thought, execution was about revenge.
And ultimately that's what this comes down to, whether you believe the justice system should be humane (and it's hard to argue that releasing someone who is about to die is inhumane) or whether it should not.
Regardless, the decision has been made and I expect people would have been disappointed either way. Some people would think it would have been cruel to keep a human being - an evil one or a whatever but still a human being - incarcerated while they were sick and blatantly no threat to anyone at all. Some people would and do think that releasing him is an injustice to the victims, that the victims family deserve some justice exacted by leaving this man to die in a prison cell.
My personal feeling is that I'm saddened that so many people find an act of unconditional compassion so disgusting.
:yes: Yeah, I saw that bit too, thanks.
Anyway, I think death is an easy way out. Lifetime imprisonment must be awful.
You can't execute someone until all legal appeals have been used up, which is only a little longer than the appeals process for someone locked up until they die.
The alternative of course is to execute everyone and just "hope" that the person you kill wasn't innocent.
Call me a cynic and all.....
Of course oil had a lot to do with it, and of course there is the issue of his appeal. His barrister basically said in court that they had dropped the appeal 'to help this release' - so in other words he's been told to drop his appeal and he will be released. That is a diabolical way to treat justice.
Yea it's a tricky one really, because to start off you need to say whether it's revenge or justice - if it's the latter then surely common decency says any judgements need to be carried out humanely in just the same way we would conduct ourselves in any other area like foreign policy or trade or whatever. Whether that's the case is often a second issue, but that in my mind is the principle.
Then, if you consider that the death penalty is a form of justice because it is the cheaper option or because it is more effective in some cases, there is the second big question - is it moral to take the life of another human being regardless of their crimes, when other options are available?
Just like we happily leave someone's ventilator switched on and give 80 year old people with weeks left tens of thousands of pounds of treatment to try to give them a few extra days, sometimes we can be irrational - we must be irrational - to appeal to the sense of decency and 'doing what is right', over what is the best case economically or financially.
I think this is the same in this situation (but this in my opinion and I respect that many people don't agree), that we have to choose the uncomfortable option of letting a guilty man go, a man who caused terrible suffering to the families of the 270 dead, because - it is just the right thing to do to let a terminally ill, dying man go home to spend their last days.
I hope nobody calls me out too severely for saying that, as it is just my opinion - ultimately this is a question of opinions because there is no right or wrong answer. I am just of the opinion it was the humane thing to do and it is a credit to our society that we even treat monsters humanely.
EXACTLY! That was my thought to.
Fuck is this about mercy. It's about political assertion of power. And how sad that this is the arena that the Scots decided to do this in.
Also him not posing a threat? Physically maybe not, but as far as I understood his part was one of logistics. Just saying.