Actually, I missed this. He wasn't effectively pardoned. He was released as part of standard practice in Scottish law whereby terminally ill prisoners are allowed home to die. You're sounding like a Sun leader writer.
That's rich coming from you!
Again, not true. In the past, I believe, ten years something like 25 terminally ill prisoners have been released before the end of their sentence to return home to die. You may not like the policy. I, for one, do.
You're all over the place here. You'd have been happier if an innocent man had been left to die in prison? At the very least, I see this as a far from perfect end that is less bad than the alternatives given that he was not going to receive a fair trial in his lifetime.
Well of course he was.
Why on earth should I? It's your point, research and present the evidence yourself. I'm not here to research your arguement. You are just blindly ignoring the links that are presented to you.
And the Pope is still Catholic!
Or... US to UK, we don't want the truth coming out in an appeal, get him to drop the appeal and ship him back to Libya smartish. [This assumes that the UK wasn't also complicit in the initial perversion of justice, and for that matter Libya.]
That's not an unusual situation with a circumstantial case. People are conditioned to expecting absolute proof like fingerprints and DNA and CCTV. Not all cases are like that. And you cannot get a proper grip of a circumstantial case, especially in a complex investigation like this, on the basis of media reports.
I don't take issue with that - there are a lot of very serious issues with specific pieces of the evidence ... but I do not think that the full circumstantial case has been clearly set out in the public domain and I was simply pointing out that saying the evidence is "piss poor" is sometimes a function of people being conditioned to expect "proof" in forms that frequently do not exist (you commonly see on here people saying "you cannot prove that" when all that is needed to prove something is evidence on oath by a witness of what they saw or heard ... providing the jury believe them as compared to the defendant).
Maybe. There is evidence that some of the testimony was at the very least unsafe, though, in fact some of it was totally worthless.
The boss of the FBI really has no business writing such a letter.
Except in this case it wasn't in front of a jury and the judges weren't aware of the direction and reward given to the star witness, Tony Gauci. Even the leading judge from the original trial refered to him as unreliable! He was found to have a picture of al-Megrahi prior to the ID parade, a parade where he was the only person of a middle-eastern appearance and where the rest of the line up were significantly younger. The judges weren't made aware of reports from the FBI and the CIA that contradicted the alleged plot. Three of the key expert witnesses have since been discredited.
Pragmatically, death from terminal illness is more predictable than general old age. But I agree there's little moral difference, if any, which is one of the many reasons why I think murderers should be hanged instead of being banged up until they die.
